


Cadence and the Pearl

by luninosity



Category: Original Work
Genre: 17th Century, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotions, Explicit Sexual Content, Fairy Tale Elements, Folklore, Happy Ending, Healing, Historical Fantasy, Love Confessions, M/M, Ocean, Porn with Feelings, Romance, Spells & Enchantments, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 04:06:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12027753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: Cadence Bell sat on uncomfortable grey rocks at the far end of the curve of the dull grey shore, and watched the waves crash over and over under the looming grey sky. He’d been sitting on stone long enough for his left leg to go numb. He ignored it.





	Cadence and the Pearl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ViperSeven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViperSeven/gifts).



> I'll probably have to take this down if I ever manage to publish it somewhere, but that takes ages, and it's a very odd sort of story anyway, being sort of about grief, and sort of about falling in love, and sort of about magic, and sort of about heroes, and sort of about the ocean, and sort of about sex and emotions...
> 
> But I wanted to share, for now. I hope you like it. :-)

Cadence Bell sat on uncomfortable grey rocks at the far end of the curve of the dull grey shore, and watched the waves crash over and over under the looming grey sky. He’d been sitting on stone long enough for his left leg to go numb. He ignored it.

Water flung itself into the rocks again. Ceaseless. Mindless. Unconcerned with his presence. This felt oddly reassuring: insignificant, he couldn’t harm the world.

Insignificant. He shifted a hand, discovered a pebble, tossed it. It sank beyond his sight.

Beyond sight, beyond reach: like the world he’d left behind back in the glittering multifaceted gem of Londre, capital-city spires stretching to the sky, streets bustling with broadsheet-boys and violet-sellers, parliamentarians and Queen’s men, politics and taverns and theaters. Above all: theaters, palaces of imagination and greasepaint and paste jewels and stories that could change the world.

Cade had taken a bow, laughing, dragged up onto that stage by his players. An author surrounded by love. A Queen’s commission, court masques, rubies in his hair. A prodigy, the Court had murmured. They’d lavished his work with praise.

He squinted into the wind of Gull Skerrie, which lay about as far from the variegated twirl of Londre ballrooms as he could get. The wind burned his eyes, unless that was something else. The waves murmured upward, though they did not sing of joy and farce and playful springtime dances. A year ago, when he’d written the lines for that pageant, the Queen herself had worn a flower coronet to play Spring.

A year ago he’d had no sense of the stone about to land in his life. Ripples and ripples, and he was sinking.

“Cadence Bell,” he said, to the wind and the sea, “Queen’s playwright and artistic councilor.” The sea sighed at him with voiceless well-meant soothing rhythm; but it had no advice to give.

He squirmed around on his rock. The curlicue of neighboring Harbor Skerrie rose to the south, followed by dotted islands that question-marked into the mainland. Cade did not need question marks at the moment.

He did not look at the village as it lurked behind him. He especially did not look at his parents’ inn and boarding-house. _His_ inn and boarding-house.

Cade did not hate The Bell. He never had. He’d loved his childhood: laughing, crawling about under fishermen’s legs, being scooped up and told stories about the selkies and the sirens and the vast and terrible storms and the narrow escapes and the giant sharp-beaked unicorn-fish. He’d loved every curl of pipe-smoke and sea-soaked wool, and had fled Gull Skerrie as soon as he could, with his parents’ blessing at his back.

He found a bit of driftwood to gaze at, brown and thin as his thoughts.

He had not been able to write in the three months since coming home. He had not been able to write through the end of his father’s long illness, and his mother’s short and sudden one. He had not had time to think, and even when he had, concepts had flapped around like the island’s namesake gulls: clamoring, wary, restless.

His shirt was not warm enough, and his boots were growing wet from spray. They’d been bought for city streets and Court debates about patronage of the arts. Cadence Bell, at seventeen, had known his own destiny lay in those streets, that Court patronage. He’d even been right.

He could barely recall those first exhilarating beribboned nights. Chess and banter and wordplay that might alter the fate of nations. Wine and lute-playing and invitations to operettas. The operettas drowned under the changing of sheets and the sound of his father coughing and the weary gnawing knowledge that someone had to open the inn and count money in the cashbox and pay the physician and settle the will and stare at the business now in his name.

He found another pebble. Overhead a single gull called out, lonely on the breeze. The afternoon floated like the twig, adrift. He’d left Gwen and Rhys in charge; the pair of them could conjure up marvelous chowders and miraculous flaky fish, but had given him worried expressions about the cashbox. Cade probably ought to worry as well. Couldn’t find the energy. Couldn’t summon the interest.

His parents were gone. His life was gone. He was somehow still here. Tidying up loose ends, or not tidying them up, or not doing much of anything at all.

This pebble felt smooth, and chilly, and surprisingly round. He glanced at it in mild interest before throwing it.

Blue-white shimmer caught his gaze. He lifted it, turned the gleam around in fingertips. Iridescent promises caressed his skin.

A pearl, he thought. Under the dome of the sky, at the end of the world, on rocks in a fishing-village: a pearl.

Quixotically, unpredictably, it suggested another life. A dream of wealth and extravagance and recognition of talent and gifts given for those talents. Strewn at his feet.

He looked at the pearl. It developed a voice, a hum; it sang to him, a wordless peal of high exquisite music in his hand.

He dropped it, shaken. That’d been the tune he’d written for the last Midwinter masque, when they’d ended with a dance; his occasional partner-composer Felix Fellini had sent over a delicate wild fantasia of melody, and Cade had put words to it, a song of wintry folklore and elfin legend with a catchy chorus. Felix liked difficult twisty compositions; Cade liked writing tunes the Court could actually sing. Between them they’d woven a musical.

And the pearl had sung it back to him.

He stared very hard at it, as it lay on cold grey rocks. It did nothing more: it was a pearl.

“I think,” he said aloud, “I might possibly be insane.” Surely that happened. From grief. From an odd hollow lack of grief, as if he’d been emptied out. From the inability to write. Twenty-two years old, he’d be a tragic cautionary tale, a genius burnt out too soon. Trapped by an inn’s cashbox. Never living up to the glorious promise of his youth.

The pearl said nothing.

Cade extended a finger. Nudged it. Still nothing.

“Well,” he sighed, “you’re no help, are you?” A larger wave hit the rock three down from his. Icy ocean exploded over his shoulder. He started to swear at it in gutter Firezi he’d learned from Felix, felt emotion ebb and drain away, and gave up.

“I might not be,” said the rocks, holding out a thick woolen blanket, “but would this, at all?”

Cade attempted levitation, flailed, slipped on wet stone. Jeremiah’s hand caught his wrist, pulled him to safety. They stood blinking at each other for a moment under slate-slab sun; Jeremiah’s mouth quirked. “I should’ve known you hadn’t heard me. Thinking?”

“Trying not to.” He scooped up the pearl, an impulse, and tossed it into a weatherbeaten trouser-pocket. “Are you done already? It’s still early, isn’t it?”

“After three, now.” Jeremiah put the blanket around his shoulders. Jeremiah Carver thought of details like that: caring for the world. “I’ve got the afternoon to help out. Whatever you want.”

Cade, feeling prickly and spiky and black-mooded as a sea urchin, grumbled, “I want to not be snuck up on, thanks.”

“Sorry about that.” And he was. Sincerity in those soft brown eyes, in broad shoulders and strong arms. They’d fallen into bed the night after Marian Bell’s funeral, after Cade had drunk too much local moonshine and run out into pounding rain and stood with his face turned to the sky, shaking with too many emotions. Jeremiah had followed him, had touched his shoulder; Cade had turned and kissed him fiercely, angrily, smothering the storm with fire. Jeremiah had kissed him back, or had let himself be kissed, or perhaps there’d been no difference; he’d come upstairs to Cade’s room readily, and had knelt and been shoved to his back and touched Cade’s body with endearing solemn awe.

Cadence, unfair and knowing he was being unfair, muttered, “Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t. I can make noise.” Jeremiah offered him a smile. “I’m having the advanced class read Spense’s _Fairy King,_ like you recommended. They’re liking it. I am too.”

“Mmm,” Cade said, noncommittal; and discovered that he could not quite meet that gentle schoolteacher’s gaze. Jeremiah organized the island’s one schoolhouse and multiple levels of ability with the tender efficiency of a beloved general, and had ever since taking it over from the now-retired Miss Beatrix, who’d taught them both arithmetic and letters and book-lore.

Cade had loved every drop of story. Had pleaded for more. When that wasn’t sufficient, not enough tales of magic and fairies and faraway lands, had scribbled his own. Had left Gull Skerrie at the age of seventeen, accompanied by a band of newly arrived traveling musical players and his parents’ best hopes for a life beyond rocks and fish, and had not looked back.

Jeremiah Carver had been a year behind him in school, stoic and silent and seemingly etched out of stone: big and calm and deliberate. Cade hadn’t known him well then, not beyond the simple fact of another boy in the school-crowd who’d listened wide-eyed to made-up stories about pirates and sea-treasure and merfolk. Jeremiah, he’d discovered since returning, had begun helping out at the inn several years ago, when Leigh Bell’s hands had first begun to shake and his chest to ache.

“Gwen said you went for a walk,” Jeremiah ventured, hand tugging the blanket more securely around Cade’s shoulders and then resting on the closest one, not quite an embrace. “If you don’t want company I can go.”

“Where _would_ you go?” Cade said, and waved an irritable hand from under woolen conquests. “Stop that. We’re at the most godforsaken spot in the most godforsaken end of the Northern earth; where can any of us go? Besides the fishing fleet, I suppose. If you like mackerel.”

“I don’t mind mackerel,” Jeremiah said. “It’s a fish. Your hair looks cold.”

“My hair is wet and full of salt. I know, I know, it’s my own fault, yes I’m coming back, Rhys has probably set the common room on fire by now.” He picked his way up across rocks, with Jeremiah’s help. “How’re your students? Any interesting ones?”

“I like this group,” Jeremiah said. “All of them. There’s a really bright girl in the third class, though, Rosie Conway, you might remember her mother, she’s Elsie Carrock’s daughter, well, Elsie Conway now, but you knew Elsie, she was your year, she married Peter Conway after you left?”

Cade, who remembered none of this, nodded. Easier.

“And anyway Rosie’s adorable and also some sort of mathematical magician, I think.” Jeremiah’s eyes were pleased and proud, dark and bright as a sea-bird’s, excited about a fisherman’s daughter doing math on a rock. “She’s nearly past what I can teach her, I’m having to keep up, I’m wondering whether it’s worth trying to send her off to the capital for school? Really proper school, I mean.”

“Then you should,” Cade said, half-listening. His fingers brushed the pearl in his pocket, the pearl that’d whispered his own song at him.

“You think so?” Jeremiah paused to glance at him. With longer legs, he’d been shortening his stride; Cade, though generally a fast walker, got easily annoyed at effortlessly tall persons. “It’s awfully far. And the money is, well…”

“If it’s what she needs, then they’ll make it work.”

Jeremiah started to answer, stopped, shook his head. “You’re likely right. After all, it worked for you. Did you find something? A shell, or a bottle, or something?”

“Yes,” Cade said. “It worked for me. And now I’m back. And, no, nothing important. Just a bit of shell. I liked it.”

He did not know why he was lying. He had not meant to, not precisely. The words had become tangled up with aching loneliness and obligation and a lack of letters from anyone he’d thought had been a friend in Londre; with the bulk of The Bell looming into view like a tomb, like his tomb for the past three months; with the kind weight of Jeremiah’s hand slipping into his. The pearl was his, and it had been magical for a single glowing instant, and he did not want to share that or to lose it, to spread the moment thin by giving it away.

“Maybe it’s a poem,” Jeremiah mused. “Seashell and ocean and a person picking it up. Could you like that? A story?”

“I don’t write children’s tales about pirates and buried treasure anymore.” Cade ducked under Jeremiah’s arm as it held the side door open for him. They spilled into the kitchen, sea-damp against heat and potatoes and bacon and salted fish and cream. “I just found it. It doesn’t matter.” In her domain, Gwen beamed at them across a saucepot. She and her husband adored Jeremiah and had been prepared to adore Cade whether he wanted adoration or not. Cade hadn’t told them yet that he planned to sell the inn.

“I didn’t mean I was asking.” Jeremiah touched his cheek, an apology and a request, and then kissed him: still tentative and shy and wondering, as if amazed to be allowed. Cadence Bell, who’d kissed courtiers in silk and velvet, who’d snickered at filthy jokes and scribbled coy references into the next satirical sonnet, now tasted saltwater and warmth and a hint of sweet peppermint; Jeremiah liked them.

He did not know how to be kissed by such honesty. He was unsure whether he liked it, whether he was embarrassed on Jeremiah’s behalf, whether he wanted to laugh or blush or look away. He said, lightly, “Good thing you aren’t. Asking.”

“I’ll go rescue Rhys from the cashbox, then,” Jeremiah promised, and went out to the front room. Laughter and lamplight and travelers bubbled up to greet him: the cacophony of sailing ships, of locals in for a pint of bitter, of merriment over the carved wooden chess set. Rhys, minding the bar and the front door and the copper pieces, said, “Ah, you can figure out change, good, take this—” as the door swung loosely behind him.

Cadence, momentarily at sea in the kitchen, contemplated bread, a knife, a sweet potato. Gwen patted his arm, and said, “Would you like supper up in your room, then? It’s a bit early, but I know you’ll be having things to deal with, the estate and all, and you’ve a letter from Londre, where did I put that, young Billy brought it over…”

Cade snatched paper from flour-dust. Skimmed pages: Felix missed him, wanted help with a new operetta, chattered about the current fashion for short coats coming into vogue, mentioned Queen Lyssa’s newest lover and his profligate spending of the royal purse upon various yachts and boating-races. Cade swam in Court gossip, and shamelessly mentally begged for more.

He had a life. He wasn’t meant for eel pies and rocks on the cliff-edge of nowhere. He mattered.

He wished briefly that Felix had inquired how he felt, before asking for lyrical assistance.

He said, “I’ll have to answer this.”

“Of course you will, love.” Gwen loaded down a tray with sharp cheddar, golden honey, bacon sandwiches, and put it into his hands. “Just to tide you over, there’s a good stew for later, go on.” Tea got added to the tray; Cade balanced food and heat and Jeremiah’s ridiculous woolly blanket on his shoulders, and escaped upstairs with only minor wobbling.

In the guest room, the room that’d once been his, he set down bacon and cheese on the writing-desk. The open window billowed white linen and sea breezes; he leaned elbows on the sill, eyes closed, breathing nearby ocean and bracing air. His parents had left him both the inn and its thriving profits; they were a waystation for every Rus’ trader and exploring expedition, as well as the village gossip center. Leigh and Marian Bell had loved the place; they’d built it.

His pocket felt strangely heavy. He touched fingers to it. A pearl. Out of the ordinary, far from home.

He curled up atop the bed—a guest bed, because he’d said he wouldn’t come home and his father’d finally rented out the room two years ago—and reread Felix’s flamboyant scrawl. He tried to think of operetta lyrics: a milkmaid, a prince, mistaken identity, a gambol.

He wanted to write back and say: is Margarita well, how are the children, how are you handling the whims of the newest Royal Consort, are hair-ribbons still in fashion? He could not think of a lighthearted bit of banter to go into song.

Music echoed in his head: from the clean whitewashed walls of the guest room, from his scattered bags and the multicolored coat slung over the chair. He blinked, discovered that it wasn’t only in his head, took the pearl from his pocket. Opalescent magic sang to him: the giddy tripping delight of that Spring dance, his own poetry in motion.

He stared at the pearl. He did not think he was insane. Magic was the stuff of legend, fable, children’s stories, fluffy plays full of sorcery and love-spells. He was only hearing his own desires.

The pale white surface felt like silk, and satin, and the quick vibrant steps of a dance, beating time under his touch.

He found himself thinking, perfectly logically, that the pearl had come from the ocean, and therefore the ocean must know about dances, and fine clothing, and musical theater. He wanted to step into the sea and find out what it understood. He wanted to get to his feet and turn that way and walk down to his rocks and keep walking—

The door opened. “Hey,” Jeremiah said, putting only his head in. His hair was standing up, dark and ruffled. “Do you want to come down for supper, or should I bring a tray up? Sorry, were you working?”

Cade shook himself, awakened, shoved the pearl back into his pocket. “I was—I’m answering a letter. I’ll come down. Give me a minute.”

“Of course,” Jeremiah said, exactly as if he hadn’t been on hands and knees on that nondescript guest’s bed the night before, moaning and shuddering as Cade fucked him hard and rough. “I’ll be downstairs.”

The head vanished. Cade stared at the clock. It informed him that he’d lost time: that he’d misplaced over an hour, in fact. He normally only did that when he was writing.

Bewildered, mind full of pearls and opera plots and impossibilities, he drifted downstairs like flotsam. Jeremiah and Gwen had appropriated one corner of a long table and were bickering amiably about the origins of North Sea sailors’ shanties; Rhys was in the kitchen and popping out to provide commentary on the lengthy chess-match happening between a feather-decorated Iroqua first mate and ocean-worn Old Joe, who more or less lived at The Bell. Tobacco and apple ale and gossip floated on the air like the homey scent of Gwen’s famous fish stew. Familiar, Cade thought. Safe. Unchanging. He knew that table and the scrimshaw art and the nick in that chair-leg. He’d known them all for years.

He hooked a leg over the bench, sat down, said, “Stephen Lowell at the University’s got a book out about North Sea raiding customs, a history, if you want the scholarly background?” Jeremiah smiled at him, and reached over and tucked Cade’s hair behind his ear. Surprised, Cade put a hand up: felt the flicker of auburn strands. He’d let it grow long, following fashion; it tended to tumble into curls when not artificially straightened to a sheer flat waterfall.

“I do like books,” Jeremiah said, and their eyes met, as the world became a single moment. “Especially books about sea-shanty singing pirates. Did you finish your letter?”

“You’re obsessed with pirates. And the North Sea raiders weren’t even. More like bandits. On the ocean.” He accepted a bowl of stew. It warmed his hands. “I’ll get to it later. Letter-writing, not banditry. Is it believable if a milkmaid’s secretly a long-lost princess, and her prince is also in disguise as a farmer, and they sing to each other over hay bales?”

“Depends,” Jeremiah decided, “on whether he knows anything about farming. Or whether she does. Is it a play?”

“An opera. Light opera. I’m trying to think of a plot. Maybe he’s a baker instead. I could have him sing one of Gwen’s recipes.”

“I wouldn’t mind it,” Gwen said, “if Rhys turned out to be a prince, with a castle, and gold.” They collectively paused to gaze at the other half of the inn’s staff, as he emerged from the kitchen to trade jokes with his wife’s fisherman brothers: sturdy and cheerful, slightly balding, that faint limp from the badly broken leg that’d brought him ashore. Gwen’s eyes softened, watching him laugh. “And what would my man do in a castle all day, in any case. Though the gold might be nice.”

“Practical of you.” Jeremiah tilted his mug of ale her direction in salute. “The two of you could always charge for cooking classes. When I was off at the University they had a lecture on the history of porridge, once.”

Gwen sniffed at him, said, “I’m sure knowing the history makes it that much more appealing when you’re hungry, then, and I hope they fed you,” and got up to help Rhys with dishes. “No, you stay put, Jer, you’ve other things to take care of.” Her wink wasn’t even subtle. Jeremiah blushed: pink as sunset, if sunsets had wide shoulders and apologetic height.

Cade glanced heavenward and tried not to sigh aloud. He did not need to be the subject of village matchmaking. He did not need anyone fussing over him and assuming responsibility for him. He did not need taking care of.

Gwen departed, beaming at them. Cade poked at stew with his spoon, explored steam and currents and methods of stirring. The easy back-and-forth had vanished along with his cook, leaving him alone with mingled evaporating annoyance and an undefined sense that he should apologize for something, though he wasn’t certain what.

His leg brushed against Jeremiah’s. Hip, thigh, knee: familiar as an old song, as bare skin in bed; but unfamiliar as well. For one thing, much taller and more muscular than the boy he only vaguely remembered. A boy who’d not left the island, who’d become a schoolteacher in that same small room with the same small desks, who—

A comment from a moment ago caught up to his brain. “ _You_ went to the University.” He heard his own voice; winced. He had not meant the words to land that way, an accusation: too poor, too unintelligent, too unsophisticated. “I mean—”

Jeremiah’s spoon hovered mid-air. “Your parents found the money. For me to go. For a year.” He might have said this as an accusation in turn. The words emerged carefully and delicately neutral.

“Oh,” Cade said, because he couldn’t think of anything else. Words. He made a living from them. “I didn’t—I didn’t know that.” Obviously. Well done.

“It isn’t really important.” Jeremiah’s smile peeked out at him: honest and pleased at interest but self-deprecating. “You were already famous. You’d just had _The Merry Husbands of Queen Miranda_ come out at the Royal Theater, and your sonnets were turning up everywhere, people quoting them on the University lawn…I liked thinking about that. About everyone knowing your words. About you being famous. You always said you would be.”

“And you could say you knew me back when I was learning to spell the word cat.” He wondered which of the sonnets people’d quoted at Jeremiah. Some of them were innocuous bits of Court flattery; some were more ironic, the biting observations of an outsider down from the North; some were luscious, opulent, seductive and wine-drenched, the poetry of a young man drunk on passion and silk sheets and lovers’ bodies. “I imagine you got a lot of free drinks. Why only a year?”

“Um.” Jeremiah became very interested in his stew. “I suppose I could have. Only a year because, ah, money. And when your father—I wanted to come home anyway. I like it here. Less noisy. I stayed long enough to be all officially trained as a teacher, but Da was all alone in that big house anyway, so I moved back in. And then I moved over to Lilah and Catie’s guest house. Nothing nearly as exciting as your life.”

Jeremiah’s taciturn and greying father managed the lighthouse out at the end of the bay, as he had for decades. Mirabel Carver had died years ago, giving birth to her son; Cadence remembered having heard that much once upon a time. The gap in between the moving home and the Parrs’ guest house hovered unspoken.

He gazed at Jeremiah avoiding the question in a spoonful of stew; he thought, suddenly, that Jeremiah knew about grief, not in the same way but in a sideways elliptical fashion, a mother he’d never known rather than one he’d lost, and a father who’d prefer to spend time with waves and sky and isolation rather than looking at his son’s dark bright eyes.

He said, “I’m sorry about earlier. I don’t mean to snap at you.” His fingers touched that arm, under that rolled-up sleeve; Jeremiah’s skin was warm, the way the inn’s common room was warm, and those eyes came back to find his. “I’m prickly today. I don’t know why.”

“Anyone would be,” Jeremiah said, “under the circumstances.” Their fingers met, entwined; boots brushed under the table. Breathlessness hung on lips, in heartbeats: abruptly real and wanting. “Anyone with your life. If you—”

Cadence, who did not want compassion and comprehension, kissed him. The kiss was quick and sharp, lighting up weary bones; Jeremiah shivered and parted lips and yielded for him, big and flushed and amazed. Cade grabbed his hand. They ran upstairs.

In the spare guest room with the white walls and the untouched tea-tray from earlier, Cadence Bell shoved Jeremiah Carver flat onto the bed, clothing stripped away, hands busy. Jeremiah’s shoulders took up a ludicrous amount of bed-space; Cade said so, sliding fingers along his stomach, down to the jut of his cock, which was also large and thick and proportionately impressive. Jeremiah said, panting, “Sorry? I can try to be smaller—”

“As if that’s physically possible.” He rubbed a thumb over the tip of that cock, drawing out arousal, slick and shining. “Anyway I like large men. I like large men inside me. So big, and so…nice.” He squeezed, not exactly gentle. Jeremiah’s eyes were wide, and his body shuddered. The roughness wasn’t unwelcome; they’d played with that, and in fact ever since the first night they’d _been_ playing with that, Cade’s hands and mouth and cock wringing sensations from him. “Such a nice boy, aren’t you? So sweet.” He put desire-wet fingers over Jeremiah’s mouth; Jeremiah obediently took them in and licked them clean, slowly, dreamily. “Stay put.”

He came back with oil, more slickness, the pot he’d inadvertently brought simply because it’d been in the bag when he’d packed to leave Londre. He’d not expected to fall into bed with anyone here on Gull Skerrie; he’d not planned to carry anything but memories when he left again.

He worked himself open, almost clumsy in haste. Jeremiah watched and did not move, despite evidently wanting to touch; need trembled in curled hands, quick breaths, twitching cock. Cade wanted that cock, wanted length and girth inside him, wanted to lose himself in pure sensation without thought or expectations or sorrow or care.

He swung legs over Jeremiah’s hips. He slid down, gasped—inhale transformed by fullness—and moved, sinking lower, taking it all. He moaned.

Jeremiah whispered, ragged, “Can I touch you?” Cade opened eyes—he’d closed them, simply feeling—and said, “If you want.”

Big hands came up to settle on his hips. Jeremiah held him tenderly, as if afraid to crush bones and flesh like glass, like eggshells, like imported exotic porcelain from faraway lands. Cadence Bell put a hand over Jeremiah’s right one, and pressed down, and let fingernails bite into the back of tanned skin. “Harder.”

“Cade—”

“I want you to fuck me,” Cade said. “You liked thinking about me, you said. About me being famous, about that poetry, was it the scandalous one about the leather dildo and the mirror that you liked, did you wonder what it’d be like, if you’d ever run into me at a pub or a bookshop—wondering if I’d invite you back to Court chambers, or backstage at the theater, bending me over across paint and props— _harder_ , I said, _fuck_ me—”

Jeremiah whispered his name again, helplessly, and did exactly that: hips pounding up against his, a relentless punishing rhythm. Cade had a hand around his wrist now, holding it captive; each thrust sent sparkles through his body now, as Jeremiah’s thick cock slammed into that spot and threatened to shatter consciousness like twinkling sapphires, edged in sharpness and bliss.

“Please,” Jeremiah was saying, under him, taut and quivering, “please, Cade, oh fuck please, I’m—can I—” His hair was damp, clinging to his face. “Please.”

“So polite,” Cade whispered back, “ _such_ a nice boy, I _should_ have taken you backstage and put you on your knees, showing you _all_ the exciting parts of my life, and you’d love it—” He felt himself tighten, gathering, coiling. Jeremiah moved under him, arching up, making small desperate sounds; Cade’s body clenched around rigid heat, shuddered at the depth and the stretch. He put his free hand, the one not ensnaring a wrist, on his own cock, which strained upward. They both groaned in unison.

He said, “You like watching me, don’t you? Getting it all over you—getting you filthy with it, my sweet eager boy—” Jeremiah bit a lip sharply. His eyes were wet too. Cade cupped his own cock, fucked himself with the weight inside him, rocked back and forth into the feel of it, the drowning radiance of it. Release came like a plucked lute-string, throbbing with reprieve, spilling itself into heady notes. Splashes painted Jeremiah’s stomach, chest, even throat: covered in him.

Enraptured, languorous, magnanimous, he murmured, “You can,” and Jeremiah groaned and pushed up into him and came, wet heat pulsing inside him, pouring forth.

Cade slid off him after a moment, finding bed space, stretching. Jeremiah got up gingerly and found towels and water. This had become routine as well: Cade collapsed into a sated sticky heap and let himself be cleaned and pampered. Jeremiah came back and turned himself into a bulwark, a harbor, a curve of solid warm muscle for Cade to nestle in against.

Outside, beyond the window, rain fluttered in: not quite a storm, but more than standard sea-damp. Droplets kissed window-panes, clung in curiosity, wandered down along old glass.

Jeremiah said, lips brushing his hair, “Was that good? For you.”

“Oh, always.” He tapped toes against the nearest ankle. “You’re utterly fulfilling. Pun intended.”

“Was it what you needed, I mean.”

Cade couldn’t see his face, and poked him again. “There’s a time and a place for philosophy. After sex is not one of them.”

Jeremiah said, quieter than the rain, something that sounded like, “I always thought it might be,” and then, “I did read the one about the leather dildo and the mirror. I liked it.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised. I didn’t bring mine, but I imagine we can improvise if you want to learn how that feels.”

“Yes. But. I meant I liked it because it felt like you. Imaginative, playful, having fun…shocking, of course, I think even at Court that one was impressive, but…” The blush was audible, but Jeremiah finished anyway, “Like you were watching yourself. I don’t mean in the mirror. I mean in the poem. The way you used to make yourself part of the stories, when you told them. Cadence Bell the writer. That was the story around the story. So I liked it because it felt like you. Telling a story about you.”

Cadence Bell the writer lay very still, staring at nothing in particular, and tried to figure out an appropriate response to that for a while. He couldn’t.

Too enormous. Too genuine. Too eviscerating: he’d written a flip and decadent poem about his own sexual proclivities, golden prodigy of Queen Lyssa’s Court, and a schoolteacher from the Northern Isles had come along and scooped his heart out of it.

He said, “Right now this story might be hungry, I think there’s still bread and tea over there, I could use tea, couldn’t you?” Jeremiah took this as the suggestion it was, and got up and returned with provisions: safer ground in crumbly crusts and one cold but drinkable shared cup.

They sat shoulder to shoulder, nibbling bits, as the rain drummed louder.

Later that night Cadence woke startled and off-balance, lurching out of dreams. Violet shapes swam in grey dimness; he refocused and saw hulking fantastical beasts become his dresser, the window-drapes, that discarded woolly blanket. Jeremiah murmured drowsily, one arm reaching for him, but went back to being a quiescent lump under pale sheets when Cade didn’t return.

He heard music. Like moonlight, like tantalizing rumors, like a kiss that hovered in the air a breath before landing.

He sat up more, naked under the stripe of moonbeam. He wiggled bare toes under the sheet. He glanced around.

The light was not a moonbeam; clouds wreathed the window. Perplexed, Cade slid to the edge of the bed, examined his ordinary guest room, the painting of the harbor upon the wall. Iridescence rose from the floor, from his flung-off heap of trousers and coat. Illuminated both literally and figuratively, he found the pearl in his pocket. It filled his hand, brilliant.

“I don’t understand,” he said to it. “I’m a writer. Of romantic fantasies. Which aren’t real. And this is Gull Skerrie. We grow eel pie and lighthouse-keepers. There is nothing less magical than eel pie. I promise you.”

He’d picked up a bit of Jeremiah’s accent and intonations over the last few weeks, as if it’d summoned his own back from the place he’d tried to lose it. Those rounder vowels. Shorter sentences, neatly dividing thoughts as if sparing them from a dragon’s hoard.

He sounded, in fact, like his father.

He swallowed down a knot of grief. The knot came back of its own accord and lodged under his breastbone, intrusive. He’d had time—they’d had time—to grow used to the idea of his father passing. That illness, lungs and heart and slow decline. He had not known quite how bad the illness had been. He had not expected, as none of them had expected, his mother’s sudden collapse, hand going to her chest in the kitchen’s doorway twenty-four hours after that. She had, of course, left him everything she’d loved.

He’d spent the last three months simply trying to stay afloat. The inn, the funerals, the strangeness of being home. The closed door to the innkeeper’s suite at the far end of the second floor.

He said to the silence of the night, “I should have come sooner.”

He hadn’t wanted to. He’d loved his life. His parents had known as much.

Jeremiah Carver had been helping them around the inn, fixing the stuck chimney, cleaning out the stables, for the last three years. Cade hadn’t known. Because he hadn’t been here.

“No,” he said. “That isn’t fair. They could’ve—I’d’ve come. If they’d written.” Of course, his pearl agreed voicelessly. Of course you would have. You’re a good person. You are.

He gazed into white round clarity. The vision opened up and drank him in, drew him in, enraptured him: himself at the Queen’s side, making decisions about royal patronage for the arts; himself dressed in blue lace and green emeralds, highlighting auburn hair and cool evaluative grey eyes; himself on a stage, laughing, collecting accolades as the play’s author.

Special, sang the vision. A boy from the North who won the hearts of the world. You know you are. You know that you are meant for more.

“I am,” he whispered. “I wrote myself out of here once. I did that.”

You could do even more, the radiance offered. Cadence, sitting on the floor at the foot of his bed, hands cupped around the pearl, could not look away. An invitation. A beckoning. A choosing: because he was special, and the people of the pearl’s home knew that, and would honor him.

A world opened up in his hands: under the sea, billowing and aquatic, green and blue and gold. Buried treasure and sunken castles. Untamed ferocious storms, lashing waves, countered by glimpses of long serene distant horizons. Mersong, eerie and inhuman, echoed. The faces he could see were beautiful, and wild but kind, and some of the merfolk, both men and women, smiled at him.

The castles were real. The pearlescent path down under the water was real. He could take steps there.

And the world would be everything he’d ever wanted: a place full of stories, full of magic, full of people who saw him and saw that he was worthwhile. No room for leaking inn roofs, or daily conversations about the latest squirming catch, or pitying glances from island-folk who’d loved his parents.

No grief, nor pain, the hurt that snagged his heart like a dripping fish-hook when he took the time to feel it. He would not be alone, if he went forth on an adventure.

He breathed, “Should I come find you? How do I—can I just walk into the sea? Can you—”

“Cade?” Jeremiah sat up, yawning. He conquered bedroom furniture merely by occupying it, as usual. “Are you talking to someone?”

The world winked out of existence. No shining golden-white promises. No tender lapping blue waves. No great quests of discovery that might give him a meaning.

For a brief moment Cadence Bell hated Jeremiah Carver, and the wooden legs of the guest bed, and the whole thick-timbered inn.

He got up, tucking the pearl back into the heap of his clothing, and came back to bed. “No one. I couldn’t sleep. You should. Sleep.”

“Mmm,” Jeremiah said, and one long arm stretched out to cuddle Cade back into warmth, both blanket and human. Rain emerged from hiding to patter on the window-glass, a companion for the shadows of night. “Can I help?”

Cade started to answer, found words stuck like seaweed in his throat, bit his lip. The question’d been so sincere, so drowsily heartfelt, that he couldn’t be flip in response. He finally went with, “Don’t worry about me. Stay right there, you’re a magnificent bed-warmer.”

“I like getting to worry about you.” Jeremiah sounded half-awake, wandering back into dreams with Cade back in his arms. “I like keeping you warm.”

“You and blankets,” Cade said halfheartedly, because his person-blanket was indeed falling asleep again, and did not hear him. He listened to the rain instead, an undemanding silken rustle that required no thought and no solving of mysteries and no care for the future. Jeremiah’s body fit around his like a shield at rest, curved and heavy and large and relaxed, with lightly fuzzy legs.

He did not expect to sleep, but he did, and he did not remember his dreams.

In the morning they woke early—Jeremiah had turned out to be among the annoying subsection of humanity who could awaken themselves at precisely the desired time, a trick which would’ve helped Cade be on time for many theater-production meetings—and then proceeded to use up all that time by staying in bed. Cade put Jeremiah’s hands on the carved wooden headboard and told him not to move, and then pushed his legs up and apart and took him ruthlessly, hard and pounding as thunder. The rain hummed. Jeremiah gasped and cried out and made very satisfactory sounds, moaning and begging. Cade did not touch his cock, and told him that if he came he’d do it from Cade’s cock inside him, getting fucked, coming all over himself.

Jeremiah whimpered and squirmed against him, arching up, trying to pleasure himself more. Cade’s fingers left prints on his hips, his thighs, his backside. Cade told him he was lovely that way, and it was true: he was, general genial calm utterly destroyed, reduced to wet eyes and flushed skin and pleading, wholly belonging to a lover. Cade fucked him harder, deeper, until Jeremiah cried out again, high and trembling, and his cock jerked and began to spill white-hot release across his quivering stomach.

Cadence, breath trapped and taken away by the sight, felt his own body respond, coiling and growing impossibly taut. The climax rippled through him unexpectedly, sooner than he’d meant, a heartbeat and a shudder and a groan as he lost himself in Jeremiah’s clenching body.

They stayed in place, panting, for a moment. The storm gathered itself, redoubled, and sang, electric.

Jeremiah was crying a little, Cade discovered after disentangling himself. He hesitated, irresolute. Offer help? Touches? Meaningless words? It wasn’t as if they were in love. It wasn’t as if the bed and the inn and those obedient arms held a future. He had not ever been good at comfort, in person; he hadn’t had to do it much. He wrote lavish overblown declarations of adoration, scenes of dramatic rescue, improbable passion at first sight; but opera wasn’t real life, and Prince Sigmund heroically slaying the wicked Queen of the Night was not the same as Jeremiah Carver swiping a big hand over damp eyes and pretending to pull himself together.

That sight more than anything else kicked him into reaching out. He might be clumsy, but he couldn’t let the man sharing his bed try to push down obvious hurt in favor of offering to get Cade a towel.

He said, “I can do that for once, or it can wait,” and flopped down onto once-clean sheets and drew Jeremiah closer, hand finding ruffled dark hair in an unconscious mirroring of Jeremiah’s earlier stroking of his; the parallel amused him when he caught up to it, and under the amusement something nameless and newfound stirred. He guided that head to rest on his shoulder. “How are you? Did I hurt you, or was it too rough, or—?”

“No,” Jeremiah said into his chest. He’d nestled into being held, oddly small for a large person, trying to fit into Cade’s arms. “Not like that. I don’t know why I’m even crying. It was good. You were. Good. I mean, it was, for you, wasn’t it? Good?”

“It was,” Cade promised lightly, and stroked his hair, ran fingers through molasses-wave softness, did not ask him to move. “You were. My nice boy.”

Jeremiah shivered, a fleeting twitch that Cade nearly missed, and murmured, “I think it’s just that I haven’t, before. Done this. With you. Or I don’t know. I can’t think yet.”

Cade’s fingers paused. They had not been prepared for this possibility. “You haven’t…”

“I’ve had sex! With men, even.” Jeremiah pulled back enough to make a face at him, suddenly cheerful now, mood swinging around into equilibrium or a very good façade of it. “You’re not my first.”

“I hope I’m at least your best.” For some reason he did not like dwelling on the idea of Jeremiah’s previous lovers. He did not want to imagine his kindhearted schoolteacher lying in bed with someone else, gazing up at someone else, opening up those sparkling eyes and that sweet compliance for someone else. He did not want to imagine it; so he did not. “Don’t tell me your first was on a fishing boat, surrounded by herring, getting tangled in nets.”

“Tuna,” Jeremiah said, utterly straight-faced, until Cade said “ _No_ ” with sufficient horror that he started laughing. “No. Though he was a fisherman, or at least his da was, and he is now. Peter Jones, that’d be. A bit older than us, all gold hair and freckles and blue eyes. No, I meant what we, ah, do. Nice boy. That.”

“Oh.” Cade considered this. It’d been mostly a process of discovery on his end, several years and encounters in the making, and that wasn’t even something he did with all lovers, nor something he’d exactly planned. With Jeremiah it’d been there since the first kiss, Cade’s hands taking charge, Cade’s mouth claiming gentle startled-but-willing lips in the aftermath of a funeral, drowned by rain then too. “You like it.”

“I do, I think. It’s a bit new. I’m sorting it out.” Jeremiah glanced past Cade’s shoulder, encountered the clock’s accusatory hands, and added with real dismay, “Oh sweet mother of mackerel. That can’t be right. That can’t be the actual time. I’m still naked.”

“Mother of mackerel,” Cade said, sitting up.

“Stop. It’s something my gran used to say. I try to not swear around the students. Habit. Where’s my book-bag? Do I have decent clothes here?”

“Not clean ones. Wait, here, towel.” He wasn’t sure how much he’d helped, though Jeremiah seemed to be well enough, or at least distracted by the need to find a left shoe before running off to open the schoolhouse. “Your hair is sort of…”

Jeremiah made a desperate sort of noise, ran a hand through it, left strands in further fluffy disarray.

“No,” Cade said, discovering suddenly that he wanted to laugh, discovering that he could want to laugh, “that’s not better. It’s adorable. Leave it.”

Jeremiah sighed. They ran down creaking old friendly stairs hand in hand. The creaks echoed in the same spots; wooden knots and whorls remembered them as boys. Cade was not in the mood to be annoyed by this, with Jeremiah’s hand in his, with the shiver of that peak and that laughter lingering along his spine, on his lips.

He’d left the pearl in his pocket, getting dressed. It brushed his leg, a reminder. It tempted him: Jeremiah would leave for the morning, and he could explore its secrets. Could hear it sing again. Could see what it showed.

He was aware that he should perhaps share the secret. Jeremiah would be interested both professionally and personally, a lover of stray flotsam of knowledge. Gwen and Rhys might know local stories about random pearls washing ashore, magical or not. Hiding the pearl, concealing it, even lying about it, was probably a sign of some sort of danger, whether sorcery or simply his own overwhelmed head.

He knew this, and yet: it was his. His pearl had nothing to do with his parents, or his grief, or their inn, or their dreams having landed on him. It had nothing to do with Jeremiah and the mild but persistent guilt Cade was now trying to avoid feeling, the sense that he’d not done enough in terms of care. It, like him, was different from the dull stones and bird-cries and fishermen’s calls of Gull Skerrie.

His pearl was his.

He said nothing. He held Jeremiah’s hand.

The common room was full of fishermen—and women; he spotted Lilah Parr and her wife Catie, someone he’d known years ago as a girl with long fair braids and pointed questions about the accuracy of his invented stories—forming knots and eddies of camaraderie, strong tea, salted fish and bacon used for emphasis when gesturing. Gwen, possibly in defiance of yesterday’s comments, had made porridge; a giant tub of it sat proudly on the main table.

A few people looked up and waved or called out to them. Jeremiah waved back, dropped Cade’s hand, and dove for bacon. Cade nodded that direction, wondered whether to wave, wondered what they thought. His hair was loose, tumbling over his shoulders, a contrast to hardworking practical ties and braids; his wardrobe of city satin and velvet, stylishly slashed sleeves and beribboned dressing-gowns, clashed with rough homespun and sea salt, no matter how determinedly he hunted down old trousers and loose shirts. He knew most of the morning crowd had known his parents, and they knew him as the boy who’d gone away and found fame with pen and ink. From occasional overheard remarks in the last months, he guessed the residents of the island regarded this fact with both pride and suspicion.

Jeremiah was waving at him from a bench. Cade collected honey and cream and the defiant porridge, rather bemusedly, and went.

“Sometimes,” Jeremiah said, head on one side, bacon in fingertips as Cade sat down, “I can’t quite believe it. You. Cadence Bell. And a schoolteacher from Gull Skerrie.”

“Yes,” Cade said.

“I don’t mean I expect anything.” Jeremiah regarded the bacon with some astonishment, as if he’d forgotten it in the wake of Cade’s arrival, and then ate it. Around the bite, he explained, “I know you’re not staying. You wouldn’t. I know you have a life out there. I just was thinking. I’m surprised by it sometimes.”

“I’ve heard that one.” Cade poured cream into porridge, a slow curl of sensuous white; it pooled into the hollow he’d made for it, lapping at sides. “My life. Surprising. Shocking. Scandalous. Infamous.”

“Famous.” Jeremiah’s foot nudged his under the table. “Growing up I thought you didn’t even know my name. Not that you had to. Not that you needed to.”

Cadence, who in fact would’ve thought the same at the time, in the present found himself unusually discomfited by the ready acceptance on that side. He ate some porridge to put off answering.

His pearl weighed down his pocket, mysteriously heavy for its size. Stories, he thought. Fairy-legends and water-nymphs. Maybe a musical interlude or a lyric poem. Secrets on a rock at the end of the world, and a tripping light melody like the transparent fluttering edges of wings and foamy waves.

“Do you think,” he said into the pause, “magic might be real? I mean, not _real_. Not exactly.”

“In stories,” Rhys said, coming and going with tea, “or the way the fishing crews talk, miracles and rescues and voices on the wind, maybe.”

“Tall tales.” Cade grimaced at his mug. “Of course.”

“Yes,” Jeremiah said unexpectedly. “I don’t mean legendary sorcerers or wicked witches or anything like you wrote in _The Downfall of King Beryl_ , but other lands. Under the sea, or in the air. Other people who can see the world in ways we can’t. Not human.”

Cade contemplated this assertion with some amazement. “Aren’t you a schoolteacher?”

Jeremiah’s ears went pink, confronted with a suggestion of impractical thinking. “You asked. And I thought maybe, out of everyone, maybe you would’ve seen—never mind, it’s for the opera, right? You were wondering about sirens and plots? Have you given up on the milkmaid?”

“Jer,” Rhys said, reappearing in a cloud of dirty bowls, “you’ll be late.”

Jeremiah glared at the clock, did not swear aloud even though many people would’ve, grabbed his bag, left a kiss on Cade’s lips: airy, hurried, affectionate, pleased. “Let me know if that helps with the plot, then? I’ll be back after classes end.”

Cade watched him go: a tall gentle island of a man in a sea of weathered fisher-folk, big shoulders apologetically fitting between bodies enjoying Gwen’s breakfast abundance. Jeremiah stopped to say hello a few times, accepted an apple, a handshake, words from a parent or two; he finally ducked out the door, which opened to stream early-morning pale sunbeams around him.

Cade did not lift fingers to touch his lips, though he had the impulse to. The kiss lingered, unexpectedly brushing something deeper than skin, leaving notes of sweet tea and crumbled bacon and warmth.

Which was ludicrous; he was a passing moment, a story for Jeremiah to tell whoever came next, and Jeremiah Carver was a nice boy who meant nothing to Cadence Bell, of course not, not like that. A diversion, a source of comfort, and certainly he _liked_ Jeremiah, he would never wish those dark forest-deer’s eyes any harm, but—

His chest ached suddenly. It did not appear to like the mental glimpse of Jeremiah and harm, the way he guessed that gaze would go soft and wounded and vulnerable, silently bleeding brown velvet, flinching from further injury. He did not like that at all, and drew a breath in an attempt to shake himself back to the present, where he discovered that he’d been glaring at a spoonful of porridge as if planning to fight it in defense of a kindhearted schoolteacher who liked sugar in his tea.

After breakfast he went back up to his room and settled into the low cushioned window-seat, tugging a blanket over his toes. He had letters to answer, music to try to write; he stared at the sea and the sky blankly through glass. Greyness crashed and coiled and swung overhead; clouds and rolling oceans squared off across rough stone. Out on the water the fishing-boats were hard at work; Cade couldn’t see any detail, but could imagine. A few sea-birds swooped above, black specks crossing his vision.

Rocks at the end of the world. Fish-nets and salt in his hair. Gull-song and wet boots by the fire.

He’d mocked his own accent in the very first play, in a comic-relief character. A yokel down from the rustic North. Amazed by the world of the capital city.

His parents had loved the island. Gull Skerrie had been for them a home, a cozy mug of tea, the lamplight spilling from the windows of The Bell. The inn itself gathered up the island’s social life and wove it together, rustic and messy and casual as hand-whittled wooden decorations. Leigh and Marian Bell had been kind and generous and uncomplicated, trying their best for a son who daydreamed of pirates and princesses and brightly-hued costumes.

The grief burned—trapped in his chest, his throat—the way it did at infrequent inconvenient times. Three months in, he’d gotten somewhat used to the idea of his parents not simply being in the next room; he had not gotten used to the idea that they never would be again.

At seventeen, he’d been sure he’d known what he wanted. He’d known he did not want their life. Like most seventeen-year-old children, he thought.

He _had_ meant to come home. Later. Another year. After another successful theatrical season. When Queen Lyssa did not require his presence as her artistic councilor. When the storms relented and travel North got easier. The year after next.

He pulled legs up, wrapped his arms around them. His hair fell into one eye; he batted it away again.

Jeremiah would be busy in the small weathered schoolhouse with the new blue door, teaching mathematics and reading and history to the children of fishermen and bakers and sail-makers. Probably gently explaining historical cause and effect, or the difference between verb tenses, Cade decided: patiently posed at a chalkboard or bending down at a desk, big shoulders careful not to intimidate, entire face lighting up with the thrill of a pupil reaching a new insight. He’d watched Jeremiah marking essay compositions the week before, intent and scholarly. He’d ended up reaching over, running fingers along that focused arm, up to a rolled-up shirtsleeve; Jeremiah, finally looking up, had begun to smile. The essays’d ended up on the floor.

Cadence Bell touched fingers to the cool glass of the window. He did not know why he was thinking of Jeremiah, of that shy pleased smile, now.

He did not want to stay here. Not his life. Not his world.

His world was Londre, and palace chambers, and theatrical sets. Cloth-of-gold and monologues declaimed. Sonnets and silk sheets. Courtiers and kisses in richly draped ballrooms. The texture of the city, cosmopolitan, cobbled, and clever, a song woven in merchants’ negotiations and University lectures and card-games among lords and ladies who controlled the wealth of the realm.

A sea-gull called, haunting and distant. A wave hit rocks, sending feathery spray skyward. Cadence, in a fit of abrupt productive anger, dove for the letter from his solicitor. He’d informed the man that he planned to sell the inn; Ned Roan, a city man himself through and through, completely understood. The letter suggested a potential buyer; Cade scribbled back a _yes, please, take this off my hands, just tell me what to do,_ and folded paper for sending.

He knew he was running. He knew stories, narratives, character. He did not want to face the hurt: to walk downstairs and see memories of his parents at every turn, to accept condolences and pity from island-folk, to smile at Gwen and Rhys, who’d worked for his mother and father. He did not want to manage a local inn on a rock; he did not know anyone, or at least he hadn’t for years. He didn’t _care_.

Jeremiah Carver, who smiled at him and still seemed astonished to’ve fallen into Cadence Bell’s orbit, would understand. Jeremiah wanted to send one of his own students, that girl, down to the capital for better schooling. Surely Jeremiah didn’t expect him to stay.

The echo of earlier claws raked across his chest; pretending he felt nothing, he slid out from under the blanket, grabbed a notebook, decided to go for a walk. The wind suited his mood, sharp and brittle.

The weight of his pearl lurked in his pocket. He brushed a hand over it. Found reassurance, reaffirmation: yes, he could be free, he could go for a walk if he wanted to, he did not have to stay tied down.

He went downstairs—the main room had mostly emptied out, mid-morning—and headed for the door. Old Joe said, as he pushed at swinging wood, “You don’t hurt that boy, Cadence Bell.”

Cade turned. “Jeremiah can take care of himself.”

Joe shrugged at him, either denying or agreeing with the statement, and returned to scowling at the chessboard and his practice game, having used up the day’s allotted words.

“He _can_ ,” Cade said.

Joe said nothing. Neither Gwen nor Rhys happened to be in evidence, though at least the husband half of the pair was likely responsible for the clatter of dishes and lusty singing that wandered out from the kitchen. The song was an old one, a sailors’ song, full of rum and sirens and good cheer. Cadence bit his lip, hard, and ducked out into the cold.

The wind was made of the North, and it snapped through his single shirt like shark’s teeth. Out of perverse stubborn pride, he kept walking. The harbor expanded before his gaze, a knotwork of grey-green water and sturdy wood and misty sky and tumbled stone. Each breath tasted of oceans, salt and horizons and the moment before rain. The houses and taverns and shops of the village clustered together at his back, gazing after him with curious widow’s-peak eyes and hand-painted swinging signs.

Cade took the well-worn walking trail along the rocks that outlined the half-ring of their safe haven for ships. At the far end Jeremiah’s father’s lighthouse towered in grim white silence; Richard Carver had been more or less a recluse even when they’d been boys. Cade couldn’t remember seeing him more than once or twice, and never on purpose, only a chance encounter or two at the closest shop. He’d never come to meet young Jeremiah after school.

Foot arrested on a lumpy rock, Cadence wandered into imagination. A story insinuated itself: an improbable melodrama of a father and son and a wife with a secret, a lady who’d been a selkie, perhaps, and maybe she’d not died in childbirth after all, maybe she’d gone back to the sea, and Richard couldn’t look at his son not only out of grief but from the weight of keeping that magical secret…

The wind danced up to twirl his hair into his face. He’d not brought any kind of hair-tie; annoyed at this lack of foresight, he twisted it into a sloppy knot. Back home—the world he thought of as home—he’d’ve had it done in intricate braids, or loops, or jeweled adornments and nets.

Nets, he considered wryly, would be one abundant item on Gull Skerrie. With fish in them.

He walked across the thin finger of grey stone and took the carved steps down the other side, down to the shore where children sometimes played, gathering stones. The pebbles of the beach lay in and out of lapping tides, quiescent, unbothered by one small human’s presence. At the moment he was the only boy standing on the shore.

He hummed a bit of music under his breath, a broken-off line from an older opera, not one of his. A secret long-lost heir to the kingdom. Hail the prophesied hero. Magical pipes and night-witches.

He watched the ocean stretch itself into fog-laden distance. He wondered whether he could step onto that endless rolling surface and walk, like walking on starlight, away from land.

Music trembled in the air by his ear. An aria, a crescendo, a sudden chorus. He knew that one; it _was_ one of his, about a greenwood outlaw and a fair maiden. He wasn’t the one singing.

He sang along, a line or two. This did not seem strange; his voice echoed from rocks and lingered on the sea, drawn into improbable round and richly textured glowing notes.

He discovered that his fingers held something. Small, also round, solid. When he opened his hand his pearl gleamed, waiting.

He asked it, under the crash and boom of waves on the shore, “What do you want from me?”

The shore shimmered. Melody spiraled out: his, but entwined with something new, wild and strange, humming and tingling and otherworldly. Not from you, it said. _For_ you. A promise. A world where nothing hurts, where you can sing with us forever, where you can live a life of celebration. A life without fish-hooks and postage-stamps and the weight of the soles of your shoes on land.

Cadence Bell, letters unsent and obligations clamoring guilty at his back and bitter wind slicing through his too-thin city-fashionable shirt, said, “Yes.”

The ocean coiled. Parted. Beckoned. Sand and stone glimmered like a multitude of diamonds.

When he took a step he knew he’d made a bargain.

In that moment, turned toward magic and music and liquid compulsion, he did not care. He’d not asked for any of the presences at his back. He wanted this: this promise, this assurance, this murmur that yes, he was desired, he’d be welcomed, he’d be a jewel in the court of the sea.

He did not stop to wonder how he might breathe, nor to think of tales of sirens and sailors’ bones, nor to permit any other voices in his head. The song mattered: rising from the sea, from his heart.

He followed melody into the depths.

Waters closed about him. Light became myriad, reflected, refracted: blue and pale, green and gold. The sharp chilly currents of the North whisked past his face; he caught glimpses of silver and celadon fish rushing by, of startling topaz and sapphire fins, of black spiny creatures he couldn’t name. Dolphins and seals bobbed up to gaze upon him, open-mouthed, as he walked.

He wandered the sea-floor, fingertips brushing feathered grass. After a time he swam, floating, lazy. He was a good swimmer; all island children learned to be. Here, though, that mattered less; nothing felt hurried, nothing required effort. He did a flip because he could, and startled a school of curious clownfish.

This ocean was no longer his ocean, or it was all oceans; he did not think he’d traveled for so long. Pink and golden reaching coral offered a clue and a confusion: nothing he’d ever seen among the Northern islands. Mother-of-pearl accents caught the light, as did scattered sea-glass and antique coins lined up like rows in a garden: a city, he understood, a signpost. He swam toward it.

He heard a man’s voice, once, singing. He did not recognize the language—something older, stranger, richer, than he recalled ever hearing in the capital city—though it sounded human. He couldn’t see the person.

He swam past other traces of humanity: ship’s hulls, broken chests, anchors, glass bottles standing up like fangs. He regarded them with less interest than the rest: what he was leaving behind.

He began to see shapes, faces, bodies. Angular fingers and eyes slanted like those of barn cats. Softer rounder faces, with curving cheeks and shadowy gazes. Waving strands of hair in green and gold, onyx and sapphire, sand and driftwood. The people of the sea appeared and disappeared: some scaled, some furred, some long-legged and nearly human but for the motions, the gills, the webbed hands. A few of them stayed alongside him. Others drifted in, drawn by curiosity or by concern over intrusion. They came and went, but after a certain point he was no longer left alone.

The dark sparkle of a close-by gaze reminded him of something for a moment. He could not think what.

His escort, now fully formed, brought him up to a rainbow sprawl of coral and stone and shipwrecked timber and brass at the heart of the underwater city; some sort of palace or home or capital. Lithe quick bodies ducked in and out of window-openings; unearthly mesmerizing calls hummed through water, conversations and chatter and news, the noises of life.

He found himself urged by tides and plucking hands toward a large open chamber, a split of shell too giant to be anything but enchanted, a mysterious shape of abalone, mollusk, bearded barnacles and luminous opal. Someone came around it, not sitting in it, casually laughing at a comment from a seahorse at a finger; someone turned Cade’s way and became something else entirely.

The Sea King drowned words and swallowed them up and gave them back as poetry. The Sea King was also a Sea Queen, both at once and at times more one than the other; they shifted with tides, but retained the same elegant height, spindrift pale hair, inky eyes, slender inhuman bones and pointed chin. They sometimes had pale skin, sometimes dark, sometimes blue as water under sun or quicksilver as a dolphin’s belly or scarred by the lash of a harpoon; at time they wore a glittering scaled tail, or long legs in clinging scaled coverings. They changed aspects with each breath, each look, each time Cade focused on one feature only to discover that the rest had altered. They could not be captured by a human voice, though he knew distantly that men had tried, and men would never stop trying, born from and drawn to and entranced by that stern sad mischievous loving power.

They were beautiful. Cade had never seen anything so beautiful.

He wanted to write a song. A hymn. A vow. He opened hands, clumsy and human; he knelt on sand before eternity.

The Sea King smiled, a line like the coil of a wave along rocks. “Cadence Bell.”

“Yes,” Cade breathed, a vow, his heart, his future. “Anything.”

“The world of men can be cruel.” They watched his face; their face at this moment held memories of thrown bottles, discarded rubbish, spears and loss and harm. “There is no magic left.”

Cadence Bell a year or a day ago would’ve protested, would’ve conjured up painted opera sets and crackling words, lyrics to set men aflame with passion or make them weep for another soul, songs sung by grandmothers to babies, and writers who dreamed of fantastic worlds. Here and now he believed that the world of men was indeed cruel, and he wanted none of it, having chosen this; he faced magic, true magic, and he thought of none of those. He was ablaze with the sheer wonder of it.

He said, “There’s magic here.”

“As long as we remain below.” A small copper fish peeked out of sea-foam hair; the King stroked it with a finger, and it swam free. “We are safe while we are secluded. Hidden. Protected. You were invited; you heard us; you came. You will remain as well, and never leave.”

To Cade this sounded eminently reasonable; he nodded.

“Our world is at your disposal.” The Sea King moved away, a dismissal; tossed back more words his direction like skipping-stones: “You may have any unoccupied chamber you would like. The libraries are in the East rooms; someone will guide you. You may find something of interest to fill your time.”

“Thank you,” Cade said to the sea, “thank you—”

They were gone. He got to his feet, vaguely embarrassed and ungraceful. His hair fanned out around his face, blending with ocean; a good sign, he decided. He could stay here.

He _could_ stay here. He had walked into magic, and he had become part of the magic, and the Sea King had invited him. Surely not everyone heard that call. Surely this world wanted him, power and poetry intermingled, a child of Northern islands and saltwater who knew something about creation and staged miracles and illusion: magic, in a way. The inn and Gwen and Rhys melted into his past, some implausible place where roofs leaked and wet coats dripped themselves dry over stone floors. His unsent letters transmuted themselves into nothing.

He thought that he might be forgetting something else, or someone; he could not think of what or who that might be.

His lips tasted salt, and magic beckoned him in, summoned him forth, called him to the billow of sea-palace. Glowing coral and old ghostly iron and blinding pearl and white bones and dusky shells yearned upward, tumbled outward, ran over drop-offs and into a reef. Occupants human and not, sharp-toothed and playful, dangerous and multicolored, swam in and out of columns, open arches, crooked corners. Vibrant life, effervescent sorcery, suffused all his senses. He belonged here. He had been offered this.

Therefore, given the freedom of the palace and the libraries, Cade vanished into legends.

He found an unoccupied room in a tower of sunset-hued coral branches; it became a repository for books, etchings, tempting improbable ancient musical instruments. He discovered forgotten copies of Graven’s _Downfall of the Emperors of Reme,_ of centuries-drowned plays, of the only copy of the second volume of Aristo’s _On the Art of Poetics,_ which had been lost in a storm. He traced the sea-folk’s versions of familiar land-tales, the old stories about the fisherman and the three wishes, about the selkie’s husband and broken vows. The stories were the same but not, flipped and mirrored and provocative: the selkie’s land-husband was cruel and the moral held a warning about trusting humans and the security of the sea, and the magical goldfish narrated his encounter with the fisherman with ironic amusement at the expense of human foolishness. The sea-dragon of the East did not want to be disturbed, while the account of the shark-like taniwha, which he’d always thought were guardian spirits, suggested that they considered their own role with a rather patronizing view of mankind, and saw offerings as their due…

Fascinated, enthralled, he wandered into thickets of history. Quick silent palace servants appeared when he needed them; he sent them to search out other volumes, to find translations of afanc folklore, mentions of the kappa or the kelpie. Every perspective, every line, became different; the world drew him in, obsessed him, called to him.

The sea preserved; magic preserved. Cadence, becoming preserved and dusted with brine himself, lost the present in the fantasy. He did not stop to ask why or how he’d been given everything; the ocean had wanted him, and he’d come.

When he appeared among Court rooms, a slim autumn-haired human in search of a new story or conversation, the sea-folk became interested in him in turn, or they seemed to be. They flattered and coaxed and asked for stories and music; Cade carried a lute he’d restrung with sea-grass and spines and silk from a shipwreck, and played whatever came to mind.

His audience fluttered fins and gills and hands in applause. They always did, no matter what he came up with; they offered him ancient wine and ocean delicacies, delicate urchin and honeyed crab and earthy tidbits he couldn’t identify. He ate and drank and let himself be adored, celebrated, encouraged; he drifted through currents and gazed at the fall of light over anemones, waving claws, sharkskin, the sea itself.

He wrote none of that music down, though he did not notice at first. When he did he did not quite seem to care; he needed to track an important difference between the Illyrian sailors’ water-horse myth and the word the sea-folk might have used, must’ve used, to tell the tale differently. He bent over ocean-washed books.

He did not see the Sea King again. He did not take offense. They had invited him here; Cadence Bell and Cadence Bell’s work must surely be important. Contributions. Left here to create them.

He lost boots and trousers early on; they did not seem polite to keep on, and one shirt-sleeve had been nibbled by a fascinated eel. He found an old flowery robe in a brass chest, another of those wave-buried secrets; he shrugged into it. He could not recall sleeping, though he did not think he needed to.

He collected antique musical flotsam into coral corners. They piled like driftwood: a kelp-snarled harp, a siren’s glittering dulcimer, a half-piano, the odd circular instrument with one string that he did not know how to play, the long carved horn that produced a disconcerting buzzing sound when blown. He explored them and catalogued them and forgot to play them. He made notes and rewrote himself into a creature of notes.

From his acquired room he could see out into the blue. Vast and uncanny and full of stories both quixotic and serene, it sang to him. He put his pearl, his guide, on his desk. It served as a paperweight.

He thought of the surface, of porridge and smoking chimneys and fishermen’s calls, only once or twice. When he did the thoughts felt veiled, flat, faraway and uninteresting. He could not find color in those memories: a muddied tidepool versus this brilliant kaleidoscopic unfolding, where every minute brought a new vision, a new bit of magic…

He found a new pen, squid-ink and slender bone, and wrote a note on the wondrous strangeness of his world: the place where he could breathe, where he felt no discomfort.

Eventually someone tapped at the coral around his tower door. Most of the small lightning-flash palace servants would simply swim through dangling shells and come in, delivering what he’d requested; perhaps this was a new one, though. He hoped it had the dolphin-song dictionary he’d been wanting; he did not look up.

The person, evidently one of the more human-like inhabitants, cleared his throat.

“Oh, just leave it.” Cade waved a hand indiscriminately: at teetering book-towers, unplanned sigils formed of ink-pots and half-drafted poems. “Anywhere.”

“Cadence.”

Cade unbent from the desk. Encountered a vision of broad shoulders and clinging sea-clothes, woven green and underwater flowers, a cloak made of flashing shifting scales and shells, a tumble of dark hair, human legs and a human voice.

Jeremiah Carver stood in the center of the glass-dusted tower with pearls braided into loose hair, and blushed at him, large and incontrovertible.

Cadence Bell said his name, slowly.

The world, the room, the tower, became a backdrop: a swirl of magic, a narwhal’s horn of magic, a skein of it, paling beside the impossibility that was nevertheless unable to be denied. Universes collided; Jeremiah’s hand, outstretched, was real. As was Jeremiah’s concerned schoolteacher’s voice: “Are you all right? Sit down—”

“I _am_ sitting down. I’m—” He forgot to take the hand. He got up instead. “You—what’re you doing here? _Are_ you here? Or am I seeing—I was writing, I forgot to eat, didn’t I…”

“I’m here.” Jeremiah hovered worriedly. “I’m not supposed to be here. Cadence, can we—”

“I don’t understand.” He kept wanting to blink. To clear eyes, head, confusion. Jeremiah was present. The island of Gull Skerrie had landed in his fairy-story tower. Scents and tastes and memories came thundering back: porridge and cream, the bite of the wind, the calls of seabirds high above…hot tea in a portable wooden mug, cupped between hands…the bustle and noise and damp wool of The Bell, and rain along a windowpane…

The scratch of a pen-nib on paper. The glorious lightheaded elation of the first night he’d watched his words performed on a stage.

The heat and shape and tanned skin of Jeremiah’s hip, the line of him under Cade’s hands, the taste of him against Cade’s mouth.

He breathed, looking back at his desk, “What have I been doing…?”

Jeremiah picked up the closest sheet. “Writing a poetic lyric history about a single etymological point in the language used in a retelling of the legend of Odyssean, I think.”

“What?”

“You’re writing it.”

“I thought I cared…” He took the legend out of Jeremiah’s hand. He had cared; he did care, as a storyteller, as someone who’d always loved words; but he’d never cared so singlemindedly before. He’d never drowned in obsession like mother-of-pearl wine. He’d never forgotten—

He hadn’t forgotten. Not precisely. Simply far off. Unimportant.

Other recognitions descended. “ _How_ are you here?”

“Ah. That.”

They were close enough that he might’ve either kissed Jeremiah or shaken those wide shoulders; he did not know, at the moment, which he wanted. The promise of a kiss might’ve happened, or it might’ve vanished, sacrificed to his own incredulity and lack of motion.

“That’s not an _ah, that_ ,” Cade spluttered finally, excavating words. Jeremiah remained present and reliable beside him, a hero wearing sturdy adaptation to the environment. Cadence, barefoot in an old brocade dressing-gown from some centuries-lost traveler’s trunk, had too many questions. “That’s more of a _what the hell_ —”

“If you’re wearing the royal favor the guards will always let you in.” With a half-abashed wave of one wrist: adorned with a decorative loop of gleaming jet and black glass and shell. “The hair just happened. On the way in. The welcome committee saw the favor. We should be going, though, I’m not supposed to—”

“You said that, but what are you—”

“You told me once not to sneak up on you.” Jeremiah ran a hand through his hair, shed trails of pearls like tears. “But you might’ve needed help waking up. So I came and said your name. I thought. Someone should.”

“But how did you _get_ here?”

Jeremiah took this less literally than Cade had meant it. “How did I find you? I didn’t, right away. Process of elimination. You weren’t on the island.”

Cadence, imagination fleetingly distracted by a fairytale possibility of vanished years, sank down onto his chair again. “How long’s it been…? And that’s not what I asked!”

“About a day. I think. Time moves differently underwater.” Jeremiah looked a bit unsure about where to stand, how to speak; eventually he shrugged. “I went by your room yesterday after I got done. Joe said you’d gone out. I thought you might need space. I didn’t try to—I waited. But you didn’t come back that night, and you had letters you’d not posted, and you hadn’t packed. And you had asked me about magic. I remembered. So in the morning I got up and I went over and dismissed school for the day, I picked up everything I thought I might need, and I came after you.”

“And no one asked what you were doing.”

“Well.” That grin lit up the underwater world: a ray of sunlight through anemone fronds, surprisingly mischievous. “Probably a few people’re wondering what the local schoolteacher was up to, dressed in fish-scales and running right off the end of the pier mid-morning.”

Cade stared at him.

“I didn’t say it was a _good_ plan.”

“Did you _have_ a plan?”

“Honestly? This is about as far as I got. We should be going. I keep trying to tell you.”

“And you make lesson schedules for students. Explain _how_ you got here, again.”

“I’ve been—”

Shells shifted across his doorway. Ocean came into the room.

The Sea King looked at Cadence himself first, but Jeremiah next, and longer, with a crooked tilt to one eyebrow. Their fingers met, steepled, drifted apart.

“I know,” Jeremiah said. “I know, I’m sorry, we’ll just be going, if you don’t mind—”

“Jeremiah Carver.” Their voice floated cool, reflective, spun moonlight over glass-flat water. “You are certainly aware of our rules. And our displeasure.”

“Yes.” Jeremiah did not take a step back. Cade, who might have, found himself looking at those wide shoulders somewhat differently. “And he wasn’t. Aware. It’s unfair of you.”

“It is,” the Sea King said, perhaps a bit annoyed, “the same choice given to every human who makes a wish, who wishes for magic or for another world or for an end to pain, while staring at the sea. Every sailor, every ancient mariner, every voyager in love with a siren, everyone who’s ever spoken poetry on a lonely shore under moonlight…”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t all of that,” Jeremiah said. “I only said it wasn’t fair.”

“You,” said the Sea King, to him, “are very human.”

“And you told me I was welcome, once.”

“Perhaps we did.”

“ _And_ free to go.”

“Perhaps we did.” Sudden spines rustled in warning. “But he is not. He accepted the bargain.”

“I know.” Jeremiah had always been good at compassion, Cade knew; that was in his gaze now. “I know you have rules. To keep this world safe. From man. But I’m asking anyway. A favor. Please.”

They turned away: not disinterested but sliding a thin hand, currently black and depthless as unmapped sea-canyons, along Cade’s papers, rustling edges idly. That same latent power and precariousness swelled to fill the room; Cade forgot to take a breath, and hastily gulped it in. The pressure eased.

The Sea King said, face shifting between recognizably male, female, androgynous and in between, “He may leave—”

“Thank you—”

“—if you will stay.”

Jeremiah’s second “Thank you” of agreement landed without skipping a beat; Cadence said, “ _What?”_

They scowled at him: capricious and motherly and disapproving of an unruly child. “You heard us.”

“I’m taking your place,” Jeremiah explained. “Magic. Rules. Your bargain was for one person. Don’t argue.”

“It is, after all, a favor,” the Sea King observed, fingering a manuscript Cade had carried off from a captain’s log. “We are allowing you to choose. Even after you arrived _without_ an invitation.”

“I had one,” Jeremiah said, “once.”

“Yes,” the Sea King said, “and we shall certainly inform our son that you’ve returned; he’ll be pleased.”

Cade, at this new information, stared at Jeremiah; the target of his silent shouting questions refused to look over, and said to the infinite eyes of the ocean, “So let Cade go.”

“Hang on,” Cade protested, “I get a say in this, you said it was _my_ bargain—Jeremiah—”

“We’ll leave you two for a moment to sort out your decision,” the Sea King agreed brightly, and dove through Cade’s window: a flash of slender verdigris scales, old deep strength and ageless energy, motion simultaneously unnerving and erotic, inhuman and deliberate as a sentence passed.

The tower room exhaled, immanence departed. Papers relaxed. Cade’s desk stopped being quite so poised and upright under its ruler’s hand, and sagged with release.

Cadence and Jeremiah, left with each other, could not exhale yet. Cade started, “You can’t just—” at the same time as Jeremiah’s “Don’t worry, I’ll be safe—”; they collided and stumbled to a halt and tried again.

“How do you know the—”

“Cade, I don’t want you to—”

Silence landed like a gemstone-encrusted shroud. They watched each other. Cade stood beside a table built of thousands of tiny shells, deceptively strong and holding a sea-aged flute and set of pan-pipes; he was afraid that if he moved or spoke he’d knock everything to the floor, instruments and shells and himself, a cork tossed in unlooked-for rapids.

He had no idea what Jeremiah might be thinking. He did not know what that sentence might’ve been. I don’t want you to be trapped here? To feel guilty? To argue about this decision? But Jeremiah Carver knew the Sea King, had had the same invitation, had walked these shimmering halls…

Jeremiah had come back. When told not to, or informed of displeasure, or some other reason he’d stayed on land. Until Cade had stumbled into magic and forgotten everyone, every obligation, every tie to the world. Every way to be human.

Jeremiah had put on a magic cloak, and had come to find Cadence Bell, who’d gotten lost. Jeremiah had pearls in his hair and fish-scales and woven armor clinging to muscles, and was gazing at him with rueful eyes, brown as kitten-fur and hearth-logs and strong sweet tea.

Cade, struck by the beauty of him, drew a breath; loosed it in a laugh of wonder.

“I know,” Jeremiah said, coming over to lean companionably against the shell-table beside him. “I look ridiculous.”

“You don’t. You look like—” Words bloomed, dissolved, failed. “You’re the hero. Of this story. The prince disguised as a schoolteacher from a tiny island. The knight in shining armor. Or a fish-scale cloak. The protagonist.”

“I’m not in disguise.” Jeremiah ran a hand through his hair, left it in unruly free-standing waves again. “I am a schoolteacher. From a tiny island.”

“It’s your story,” Cade said, gazing at him, drinking him in. “Not about me at all.”

“Everything is,” Jeremiah said elliptically, “one way or another. In my head it is, anyway. Are you warm enough?”

“You’re still asking that.”

“I’ll always ask.” Jeremiah touched his shoulder, let the touch venture carefully up to Cade’s cheek. “If you don’t mind.”

The care became too much, abruptly; he did not deserve it, could not take it, from the man who’d proved to be the hero, rescuing a boy who’d stumbled into another world. He did not move because he felt too much; Jeremiah must’ve seen the emotions in his eyes. The touch lifted away.

“I didn’t mean—” Cade tripped over his own heart. “I don’t mean—I don’t know what I mean.”

“No. It’s fine. I shouldn’t’ve—” Jeremiah at least seemed equally ill-equipped for this discussion. “It won’t matter now.”

“What?”

“They said. I’m staying here.”

“What,” Cade said again. “No.”

“It makes sense. I’ve been here.”

“So’ve I! And you came to get me.” They gazed at each other for a moment; Cade found his mouth quirking into almost a smile, because Jeremiah was doing the same, entertained and frustrated. He said, “You have reasons to go home. I—”

And then he stopped, because those words gave away too much too fast, and in any case he was no longer certain they were entirely true.

Jeremiah had come to rescue him. Cadence Bell, for every improbable opera plot and daring fictional escape, had never had anyone try to rescue him before. Had never known anyone who would.

“Ah,” Jeremiah said, barely a sound, almost inadvertent: as if struck by a fist. “That’s what it was. For you. Freedom. I’m sorry.”

But Cade was already saying, “No,” saying it over the end of that pain; Jeremiah should never be wounded by his carelessness, much less when he—when they—when Cade himself— “No. I mean yes. At first. It wasn’t you, it was—everything. My parents. The inn. The _wind_ —”

“It was too much,” Jeremiah agreed, not without recognition.

“You weren’t,” Cade explained helplessly. “ _You_ weren’t. You were—the best part of it. Someone who kissed me in the rain, who—you were there that first night. Every night. When I wanted you. I only—I wanted to not _think_. For a while.”

“I know what you mean.” And he did, Cade could see it: if anyone could, of course Jeremiah Carver could. Someone who’d loved and lost Cade’s parents too, someone who knew about the lure of magic, someone who gave uncomplainingly: to schoolchildren, to an aging couple needing assistance, to a fretful grieving playwright who needed an anchor.

Cadence, who’d been awakened by Jeremiah saying his name, said, “Was it that for you, too? When you were here?” He thought: I’m not going to let you stay. I’m not going to let you sacrifice yourself. I’m here now.

“Not quite,” Jeremiah said. “Is it still? Too much? Did you not…need the rescuing?”

“I did,” Cade said almost absently. “I do. And you did rescue me, you know you did, that first time you ever kissed me…what was it, then? Your story.”

“Oh. You don’t really want to—it’s not exciting—”

Cade raised eyebrows, waved a hand: indicating precisely where they were, and why, and the uncanny glint of light through breathable water. An envoy of small silvery fish darted by the chamber’s window, glanced in, and darted away.

“Do we have time? They’ll be back to—”

“I want to know.” Cade rethought his own way of asking. Tried instead, “If you want to tell me. I’d like to know.”

Jeremiah gave in at this. “Mine was called Nerein.”

A person, then, that King’s son; of course for Jeremiah it’d been a person. Not an abstract intangible need, not a lifting of weights, not a dropping of burdens and a tantalization of careless days. Cadence found himself both immeasurably annoyed at this evidence of goodness, and utterly depressed in the face of it.

He said, airy as the element they weren’t breathing, “Sounds like a fairy-story romance.”

“Obviously not,” Jeremiah countered, but mildly. “Considering where I was, and where he was, when you came back to Gull Skerrie.”

“Obviously nothing. You walk under waves and wear capes made from magic shellfish.”

Jeremiah flinched. Cade wanted to be satisfied, and felt a bit sick instead. He turned away, picked up a pen from the desk, toyed with it; it slipped from his grasp and left green ink in a stain across the mother-of-pearl surface, a smear over a half-written tale of glass submersibles and legends of ancient surface-kings on a visit fathoms below.

Jeremiah said finally, gingerly, picking out a bridge across perilous rocks and shoals, “No. You’re right. I didn’t tell you about me. Which wasn't fair. But I made a promise. Not to tell anyone. Not to come back without being invited. The—the cape’s only for the enchantment. Being here. I’m not supposed to use it without being asked.”

“But they’ve asked. _He’s_ asked.”

“No,” Jeremiah said. “Not since I asked to come home. I think I might’ve offended—someone.”

“They let you keep it.”

Apparently unconsciously, Jeremiah touched his wrist, obsidian-abalone glitter, hanging magic. “He said it was a gift. He said it was—some things could be freely given. And if I ever chose differently…”

The words hung impossible fire in the deep, painted like pain across the cluttered room. They scrawled hard-won knowledge over heaps of robes, scrolls, driftwood, bone cups and the last dregs of undrunk wine.

Jeremiah Carver, walking alone along a shore with a face turned into the wind and a father’s bitter indifference at his back, had chosen. Had chosen again, later. Had left with an enchanted cloak and royal favor and his freedom.

“Did you—do you love him?” Asking the question, Cade uncovered a hole in his own chest: a pressure and a loss, a stab that left him off-balance. “Your merman. Or whatever he is. Nerein.”

“No, of course not, how could I when I’ve always—” Jeremiah changed this answer mid-current, a different stream of words. One hand rearranged his hair, knocking pearls askew. “Maybe I did. In a way. The way you’d love the sea. The sky. A storm. More than ordinary. Not human.”

Cade couldn’t reply. He did not know what his expression was doing, only that it caused Jeremiah to add swiftly, “But he couldn’t understand. Why I missed Gwen’s porridge. Why it mattered that I helped your father fix the roof. Why someone needed to bring Da supper.”

“Porridge.”

“And bacon. I’m only human.”

“And you talk to sea-folk,” Cade said, “and you had an affair with a merman, and you’re wearing fish-scales…”

Jeremiah laughed, a small flustered pink-edged sound, and lifted a shoulder, dropped it: a shrug.

Cade said to him, “You don’t deserve this.”

Jeremiah shrugged at him again. “I chose to come.”

“I can fix this,” Cade decided, in motion, pacing, unable to stay still in the face of that last truth. “We can fix this, I can change it, I can save you, I can’t let you do this, I can’t just—I can’t leave you here. There must be something. In the legends fairies like stories. Music. Songs. I could write a—what?”

“Cadence Bell,” Jeremiah said. He had one hip propped on the shell-table, and his smile was fond. “Changing the world. Fixing the future. With stories.”

“Jeremiah Carver,” Cade answered, arrested mid-pace, coming back over. “More than ordinary.”

“Not so much more.”

“More than _me_.”

Jeremiah actually tossed a grin at him, wry and familiar and easy and breathtaking. “Not so much more than that, either.”

“I’ll stay,” Cade said. “I’ll stay here. I would’ve. If you hadn’t—I’d’ve stayed.” Lost. Not found. Drifting.

“You can’t,” Jeremiah said. “Your writing, your life—the Queen’s Council—I’ll stay.”

“I’m good—I’m brilliant—” He said it without arrogance, a fact; Jeremiah nodded back. “—but I’m not irreplaceable. I’m young and famous and pretty and Lyssa likes young and famous and pretty. Someone else could represent the interests of the arts. Hand out royal monies. Organize theatrical exhibitions.” He faltered, added, “Write better plays.”

“No,” Jeremiah said. “No, Cade—I know what I’m doing. You didn’t. When you fell into this world. And no one writes better plays.”

“Confections. Spun sugar. I make people laugh.” He prowled across the room and back. “Operettas and fantasies. You have a job. You have a life.”

Jeremiah cocked an eyebrow at him, arms folded. Cade learned that even under the ocean, debating a future without any dry land, he could be distracted by Jeremiah’s biceps. By Jeremiah’s mouth, mobile and currently being ironic. “We’re _in_ a fantasy. Mermaids and sirens. Breathing underwater. If you’d not noticed.”

“Yes, thank you. I’m not letting you do this.”

“The world needs spun sugar.” Jeremiah twitched the cloak out of the way, let it pool onto the corner of Cade’s table. Unflappable and sure: a schoolteacher with jewels in his hair, with links of jet at one wrist. “The world needs to laugh. To smile. To believe in magic. And I broke a promise, anyway, coming here uninvited.”

“I am trying,” Cadence said tightly, “to save your life. You’re making it difficult.”

“Sorry.”

“You can’t just _accept_ this—”

“Why does it matter so much? To you.” Jeremiah glanced away, fiddled with the loops of ocean-fairy favor; Cade ended up struck into wordlessness by this unwittingly delivered harpoon. “And. Also. You don’t get to _let_ me do anything. No matter what we’ve done in bed. Or out of it. I might enjoy asking you for permission sometimes, but I’m making that decision. About when and where. To give in.”

“You—”

“Don’t tell me I don’t get to choose.”

Cadence, horrified, breathed out, “No, I—I never meant—Jeremiah—” He put a hand to his mouth; he couldn’t seem to breathe. The spell wasn’t wearing thin. The bottom had dropped away from the ocean, and he’d been caught in a whirlpool.

He lifted his gaze, saw Jeremiah watching him, couldn’t speak. The dawning came like a gathering wave, an indrawn ominous pull before the crash. Even if he could find a way out, even if he could save one of them, salvaging the wreck might be impossible; he saw what he’d done, then, in those eyes.

He murmured, a forlorn tatter of a promise, “I’ll still try to save you…”

Jeremiah, rather unexpectedly, laughed.

“Thanks,” Cade said.

“No. Sorry. It’s just…” Jeremiah got up from the table; it made a peach-and-ivory backdrop behind him. “You sounded like me.”

“Ludicrous giant martyr that you are,” Cade complained, without heat, with miserable belated recognition. He knew the emptiness in his chest now. He knew it too late; all he could do would be to offer himself up in place of the sacrifice, to let Jeremiah be free. “Coming after me. _Such_ a nice boy.”

“Yes,” Jeremiah agreed, reaching out, brushing a bit of sea-foam or lace or broken shell from Cade’s hair, tucking it back behind one ear: an echo. “Both of us. We’re terrible at this, aren’t we.”

Cade’s hair wanted to be touched more. “What happened? The first time you were here.”

“I’m not good at telling stories. Not like you. And I promised I’d keep their secret from anyone not—”

“We’re _here_.”

“We are. I was out for a walk—walking back from the lighthouse, actually. From seeing Da.” His smile went sideways for an instant. “And you know Da and I don’t really—it was what it generally is, that. And your father was so sick, and the air was so cold, and I went down to the shore and I stood there in the wind for a minute, and I saw someone in the waves. He looked like he needed help.”

“So you helped.”

“He was trying to free a seal-pup from a net, or I thought it was a seal-pup, and when I got closer I saw them both. You’ve seen them now. The sea-folk.”

Cadence Bell, looking at Jeremiah Carver, thought: yes I have. And so’ve you. And you and I both know how capricious, how unnerving, how not quite human that first sight can be. And you waded in to help.

“He took my hand, after,” Jeremiah said, “old-fashioned, you know, courting. Playful, he knew it was old-fashioned, but—but I liked it. And he was so—he smiled at me. And I needed a smile, and he said he’d like to thank me. So I went with him. Under the sea.”

“How long,” Cade said hopelessly, “were you here? With him.”

“Oh, well. An afternoon. And a night.”

“ _One_ afternoon.”

“And a night!”

“And you came back. Home.” You chose to come back, he thought. You rescued yourself. No one found you. You walked out of the ocean and away from a magical shining boy who took your hand and wanted to thank you, you left a place you could’ve stayed forever with no hurt and no thought for the surface world, and you came home.

“Your parents needed me,” Jeremiah said. “Da needed me. The school needed me. What else could I have done?”

“What else—” Cade shook his head, felt the laugh get trapped in his throat: short and unamused and broken-hearted, though he had only just found out he had something remaining to break. “Sometimes I’m not sure you’re real. Or maybe I’m not. Was your selkie all right, then?”

“Yes.” Jeremiah gave him a head-tilt, scrutiny with a kind of surprised recognition. “I never knew you worried about that. I never knew you worried.”

“I’m not a story,” Cade said. “If I were writing it I’d leave out the bit when I slept in an attic with three other actors and hated talking to anyone because of my accent. With rats. The attic, I mean. I wasn’t famous _overnight_.” An idea kicked him in the back of the brain, trying to get attention. He couldn’t quite see the shape of it.

“No, it took, what, an entire week before the world noticed your genius?” Jeremiah put an arm around his shoulders. This felt large and safe as shelter. “You’re real. I’m real. This is real. And sort of horrible. And amazing. Is that a copy of Graven’s—”

“Oh. Yes. I’m not sure _that’s_ real. Magic.” Horrible, he considered. And amazing. Which parts? “Think they’ll let us borrow it?”

“I’ve probably used up my favors,” Jeremiah decided, “but it can’t hurt to ask. You know, in that fairy-story about the Beastly Maiden and the Beautiful Suitor, I always envied her enormous library.”

“So did I. Floor to ceiling, towers and towers of stories and histories…” They pondered fairytale magical libraries for a second, together; Cade, glancing over, found Jeremiah glancing at him. His next breath forgot itself and turned into a smile; so did the answering expression. He added, because it felt right, “Only the library? Or her Beautiful Suitor? I always liked the idea of a kind boy who loved books turning up to rescue me from a curse.” He saw the comparison too late, and stopped talking.

“And he was, of course, Beautiful,” Jeremiah said. “Which didn’t hurt. Books and a good heart and beauty. I’m sorry I’m not your hero. It’s all going wrong and I didn’t actually have a plan. I normally do.”

“I know. You _can’t_ think you’re not—”

“Around you I do things because I want to.” Jeremiah sighed, leaned into Cade a little: holding on as much as protecting, an admission. “I don’t stop to think. I followed you into the rain that first night because I couldn’t not, and you kissed me, and I wanted that, I wanted to get on my knees and into your bed, and I wanted to help you, you were hurting and I wanted to be there for you, as much as you’d let me. I know that’s a fantasy too. I wanted to be your prince for once. Without even thinking about whether that was what you really needed. Or whether I even could. Be anyone’s fairy-story. Me.”

“But you were,” Cade said, wide-eyed, “you _are_ , you’re everything I didn’t know I—”

Shells rattled and sea-tides rustled. A confusion of scales, shimmers, diaphanous fins and prickly spears and fascinated kaleidoscopic eyes rampaged into Cade’s too-small palace tower. The Sea King had brought an entourage, swimming outriders, royal heirs in circlets of gold with heavy coiled collars and arm-bands. The children of the sea regarded interloping humans with expressions ranging from interest to mistrust to political intrigue to lazy swells of lust like the throb of desire between legs, wet and dripping, on a beach kissed by waves. They were all beautiful; they were as alluring and unalike and unpredictable as their parent, who stood at the forefront of the force and promised wordlessly to make an example of intruders and oath-breakers.

The Sea King inquired, resplendent and lovely and forbidding, “Have you chosen which of you will abide with us?” Their expression suggested a lesson for their children about the untrustworthiness of land-dwellers.

Cade opened his mouth. Jeremiah stepped on his foot, and began, “I’ll—”

“Oh,” said a voice from behind a trident, around a curving black-and-white sibling’s fin, “you.”

The voice was youthful and entertained and half-irritated; the merman who dove to the front, heedless of cross-currents and choices, had tangled green hair and skin the color of oceans on a moonless night, body below the waist a thrilling curve of night-promise scales, and eyes like teenaged aquamarine gemstones. Cade thought, young; and then thought, yes, young and beautiful and magical. And this boy kissed Jeremiah’s fingers, once.

“Me,” Jeremiah agreed. “I’m sorry. I’ll say it again if you want.”

“No,” Nerein said, “you said it then. And you only came back to rescue _him_. Still trying to save the world, are you?”

“You’re still the same age,” Jeremiah said, “as when I met you.”

At this point Cade came to two realizations: first, that the boy’s comment had been not precisely malicious but intentionally dismissive, and directed at himself; second, that Jeremiah’s wistfully adult reply had cut right back. He found himself tempted to whistle in admiration.

“There are many men,” said Nerein. “They come and go. And they’re all just humans.”

“Yes,” Jeremiah said, more kindness in the answer this time. “They do come and go, don’t they? For you. But we remember your face. We remember your smile. We never forget you.”

Nerein looked everyplace but at Jeremiah; flicked his tail, suddenly much more awkward and much less ethereal, and muttered, “You do make it hard to stay angry, don’t you…”

“He does that,” Cade said. “It’s a sort of magic, I think. Jeremiah—”

“Enough.” The Sea King crossed their arms. The room, shells and ocean-children and tiny hovering seahorses, got quiet. “My offspring conduct affairs with humans as they see fit. This particular drama can be resolved another time, assuming our son remains possessed of any interest in you. Are we correct that you are remaining with us?”

Nerein winked at Jeremiah, and mouthed something that, if Cade was any judge, seemed to be _very interested_. Jeremiah’s ears went pink. “I said I’d—”

“Wait,” Cade said.

Everyone turned his way. Even the water brushing his bare toes paused to listen.

And now he needed words.

He breathed in—salt, oceans, life—and looked at a merman, at a sparkle of jet in a bracelet, at Jeremiah. He said without planning, “We do remember you. We think about you. We dream about you.”

The Sea King seemed rather nonplussed at this non-answer.

Cade found a tightrope, caught balance, had no safety-net. Kept walking. “We always have. Poetry, fairy-stories, sailors’ legends. My own plays. Fishermen. Feeding us. Children who play on beaches. You’re always there. We love you.”

“Your point,” the Sea King suggested. But a few members of the Court were nodding; a few expressions looked thoughtful.

Cade said, “You stay hidden, you stay a legend, for safety. But what if you didn’t?”

Jeremiah said, “Cade…”

“We protect our world.” The Sea King regarded him as they might a barnacle, a snarl of flotsam, an inexplicable human artifact with a robe falling from one shoulder. “That is how—”

“Yes, but you don’t, do you? If you have humans blundering in here. If you have to keep us forever so we don’t tell anyone. It doesn’t _work_. The stories get told.”

“What would you propose we do?”

Cade raised eyebrows. “You can breathe on land, can’t you? Some of you can make legs or whatever.” The Sea King was in fact wearing theirs right now. “Come out. Talk to us. Be real.”

Everyone spent a moment simply looking at him.

Cade shrugged. “Why not? The world isn’t fair. We all said so. Let’s change it.”

They looked at him some more. No one waved a spear, though; so he put hands in the pockets of his borrowed antique robe, put eyebrows up, and waited.

“And you would be kind to us if we did. Your people.” Finally, some answer: a turning, a motion to dismiss, to mock; but the Court, especially the younger members, murmured among themselves. The King turned back. “You are attempting to distract us.”

“So I accepted your invitation,” Cade said. “So I made a bargain with you. So I’ll stay, if you want, but what if I helped you? If we came to shore? Some sort of official, I don’t know, embassy or envoy. I’ve arranged enough treaties and happy endings on stage. I can certainly tell you how to talk to the Queen. She likes operas and jewelry and her people being well fed. Which I think you’d both have in common, both being good rulers, caring for your people, worrying about their safety, all of those important concerns.”

He was submitting his first play, sending his first sonnets to publishers, writing a new narrative and cutting a swathe through the Court and wooing an audience; he knew what he was doing, and he knew how to smile at a Queen or a Lord, and he pulled all those skills and all those seductions right up to the surface and threw them in. “We could correct some of those stories. Sirens, kidnappings, the cruel lure of this world, all of that obviously untrue and unfair rumor. You could help us learn. And we could talk to you. Have you ever had really good apple cider? Or pear and honey tarts? My cook makes them. They’re an experience.”

“You want us to learn from humans,” said the Sea King.

“He didn’t have to help me rescue Tera’s pup,” Nerein said unexpectedly, “after that storm, but he did.” One of his sisters murmured, “What’s a pear?”

“I want us to learn from each other,” Cade said. He was holding his breath to some extent; mostly he was grinning inside. He knew this; he knew how to do this. He’d directed actors speaking his words, he’d shaped musicals and operettas, he’d done poetry readings and commanded a stage. He’d made Council meetings sit up and take notice and divert attention and funds his way. Dazzle, spectacle, stage direction… “I want to make this a new world. Something no one’s ever done before. Us, here, right now. We can start with Gull Skerrie, it’s where we’re from, they already make a living from the ocean. We live alongside you and with you. I want to do this with you.”

“With a human.”

“We’re the ones who’re here. Why not?”

“We do not…we are not human.” But the Sea King kept looking at him, at Jeremiah, and hadn’t moved away; their eyes gave away nothing, but the incline of that head, the softening of posture, meant they were listening. He hoped so, anyway.

He said, “I know a schoolteacher who can show you what being human is all about. Come to think of it, would a school be a good idea? A university. Cultural studies center. Cultural exchange. Meetings of ideas. Guest lectures. Presided over by _Professor_ Carver, naturally.”

Jeremiah’s mouth dropped open. “Cade—”

“Jer, don’t be modest. You’re more of an expert than anyone else could be.” The story swept in and raced along his bones. The myth unfolded itself. Tales spun into sea-flume futures. He hopped on board and kept up, flying. Riding the waves.

He was, he discovered, enjoying himself immensely.

He tacked on, “Of course that’s jumping ahead a bit, but why not? If we’re going to do this we might as well host a banquet, hold a festival or two, rewrite some history books. I like the banquet idea. It’s easy to get to know someone when you’re eating their food. And can we make a copy of some of those books? More than one copy, honestly, the scholars at the University would love them and Jeremiah wants at least the _Downfall of Reme_.”

The Sea King blinked at him. A flutter of silver scales swam past, a dart of, yes, a school. Cade pointed at Nerein. “And we’ll borrow you.”

“As a hostage.” This time their voice held echoes of tempests and gathered powerful waters and love.

“No. As an ambassador. He’s your son, isn’t he? Let him come learn about land. I’ll stay here. We’ve already said. In trade.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Nerein said, looking at Jeremiah.

“ _Cadence_ ,” Jeremiah said.

The Sea King studied Cade’s face. “You have the authority to promise all this.”

“I’ve got Queen Lyssa’s royal seal somewhere on a charter. I’m a member of the Council. The Queen listens to me. _And_ I’m famous.” Technically all these words were true. He listened to himself tap-dance on water; he heard the beat of his pulse in his veins, and he knew he was alive.

And he knew, too, that he’d make this work. No doubt admitted. No other outcome. Cadence Bell was a crafter of stories, and this was a good one; Cadence Bell would tell the best story of his life, and Jeremiah would walk free back to shore.

The King’s attention shifted: away from him, toward a newer or more familiar target. “Jeremiah Carver. You helped our son once. You’ve kept our secret.”

“I’ve tried,” Jeremiah said, quiet and sincere as underwater stone, sea-glass, strength.

“You are an honest man.”

“I’ve tried to be that too.”

“What do you think?”

Jeremiah glanced at Cade. Picked up a pearl, not Cade’s but his own, one of the scattered opalescent scraps falling from his hair. Turned it over in human fingers, set it down. “I think it’s not a bad idea. To talk to people—that’s never a bad thing. If you want I could—”

“Of him.” The King’s gesture swept Cade up in evaluative tension; Cade held his breath. He did not know, if honesty were required, what Jeremiah might say. What those calm dark eyes thought of him, today.

Jeremiah drew a breath, loosed it: a laugh, or a sob, or an arrow into Cade’s soul; none of them knew yet. “Cadence. Oh. Well. He’s a poet. And a storyteller. He imagines worlds.” The Sea King nodded, unspeaking, listening. Cade bit his lip so hard copper flooded his tongue.

“He’s _always_ imagined worlds,” Jeremiah went on, glancing over. His eyes met Cade’s; brief unexpected warmth flickered. “He is one of the Queen’s councilors. He’s telling the truth. And that’s always been him. When he says he’ll do something. He makes it come true. And he is right about being famous.”

Cade lifted a finger, threw in one extra point. “ _And_ thoroughly rich. Which is important for getting things done, don’t say it isn’t.”

Both of them gave him, to his secret delight, nearly identical looks. The looks had to do with power and politics and agreement and sarcasm.

To Jeremiah, the ocean inquired, “You would agree to this.”

“I would.” Jeremiah’s grin popped up out of sea-foam and sudden conspiratorial delight. “How often do you get to rewrite the world? Two worlds. I’m a teacher. I want to see this moment in a history book someday. When we decided on a future.”

The Sea King said to him, to both of them, to the assembled audience, “We have considered this choice before…”

“But you’ve never done it,” Cade said. “You’ve never taken that step. And, of course, you haven’t done it with _us_.”

“Cade,” Jeremiah attempted, pained.

But the Sea King laughed. Their eyes were intrigued, tides shifting, drawn in to shore. “You do remind me of my children.”

Cadence winced internally for an extremely specific reason—it had to do with Jeremiah and a royal merman and flirtatious winking—and retorted, “And I’ll accept the compliment in the spirit you meant it. Shall we try this together, then?”

“And,” the King finished, amused, “you will thereby render your bargain with us unnecessary, as you and he will both be needed in this endeavor.”

“Oh,” Cade agreed, utterly demure, “I suppose we will. And it’d be such a lovely show of goodwill on your part, forgiving that, wouldn’t it?”

This time the Sea King laughed aloud. Cadence put on his best charming-Queen-Lyssa smile.

And they answered, smiling back, “Go, then. Go, and by all means take some of my children with you, any who wish to visit; you can speak with your people, and I shall speak with mine, and let us say…in a month, we will come to you. On your island, on the shore where a boy rescued a selkie-pup. Look for us there.”

“We will.” Cade hadn’t managed to exhale yet; jubilation and triumph and iridescent success swept through him, left him weightless and exhausted and wanting to laugh. They’d done it. They’d changed the course of the world. Of both worlds.

He’d saved Jeremiah.

The Sea King nodded at him, and eyed Jeremiah’s wrist, that link of jet and beadwork. Jeremiah turned his hand, reached for the clasp, fumbled to hand it back. The King shook their head. “Keep it.”

Jeremiah hesitated. Took his hand back. Nodded.

As if this were a sign, sea-folk swirled up around them: dolphin-shapes and seal-shapes, mer-tails and bare legs, skin and silken hair and pelts and rippling scales, small and large and in between, amber and teal and sunny bronze. They formed a knot of chatter, of laughter, of bubbles and whipped frothy water; their exuberance drew everyone from the palace and up and onward.

More magic, Cade thought, vertiginous and breathless in the flood. Wherever they’d been, they were rushing to the surface, hurtling toward it, sunshine streaming down. The other side awaited; an uncharted future awaited.

Fingers brushed his. A hand. Jeremiah twined them together, holding on. Cade now couldn’t breathe not simply from being rushed skyward but from amazement. He held on in turn, as the ocean thundered up to the surface.

They spilled out onto a familiar pebbled beach in a cacophony of seaspray, waves and voices, bodies finding legs, scales flickering and flowing. Merfolk laughed and stretched and gathered limbs with undisguised interest, staring at sturdy houses and stone steps and the market and rain overhead, falling restlessly from smoky rolling skies. Fishing-boats were turning in the distance, having seen the ocean boil and erupt, moving to put back into the harbor; Jeremiah’s enchanted cloak got wrapped around Cade’s left leg. They tripped over each other, righted themselves, did not let go; Jeremiah breathed, marveling, “What did you do?”

“We,” Cade whispered back. “What did we do, I think—”

Motion, his name, a gasp on the wind: they turned as one and belatedly registered the knot of human faces, the crowd that must’ve seen the commotion bubble up and froth over. They milled a few feet away, uncertain: a tangle of kelp and color and fantasy had exploded out of the sea and into their lives. The fantasy contained Cadence Bell and Jeremiah Carver, dressed like a sea-fairy tall tale; human bewilderment found recognizable faces in Gwen and Rhys, Old Joe and half the villagers, some of the older children from Jeremiah’s classroom. Gwen called over tentatively, “Cadence…?”

“It’s us!” Cade yelled back, “it’s us, we’re here, this is good, they’re here to talk, they’re friends!” Nerein waved.

Gwen took a step forward into the short distance, as another wave ran up to soak legs and trousers and skirts, matching the rain; Cade and Jeremiah took steps that way too, followed by irrepressible mer-folk curiosity. A figure emerged from behind Gwen at a run, and met them halfway and skidded to a panting halt.

This figure had Jeremiah’s height, though thinner, and the same rich molasses windswept hair, though greying heavily, and had gotten dressed in a hurry, mismatched boots and no coat and a knit jumper with a frayed seam; Richard Carver gazed at his son at the head of a fairytale, dressed in scales and pearls and seawater, dripping on pebbles and stones and sand. He whispered, “I thought—they said you’d jumped from the—”

“Oh, no,” Jeremiah said, “oh no, Da, I’m fine, I’m here, I’m right here—” and his voice shook.

Richard’s voice did too: a thread of glass over chasms, yearning for the other side. “What have I been _missing_ …”

“Oh—well, that’s kind of a long story—but I’m here, I’m safe, I’m home—” And the next second Jeremiah dropped Cade’s hand as he became engulfed in and returned the hug. Another wave crashed into them; they staggered, kept on finding each other.

Nerein said, arriving without warning at Cade’s elbow, “His father seems nice.”

“Yes,” Cade said. “I suppose he is.” He couldn’t say anything else; he watched Jeremiah and found himself smiling, though his chest twinged, hollow. His hand felt empty. Rain ran through his hair.

This reunion had broken some sort of spell; villagers swarmed forward, began offering hands to shake and blankets for warmth, waved and pointed and made introductions. The Sea King’s children accepted handshakes and wool and hot cider tentatively but with grins and given names in turn: Tethys, Lir, Namaka. One of the older girls that Cade had thought must be Jeremiah’s students said admiringly, “Oh, that’s _pretty_ ,” about a shell bracelet threaded with gold; the sea-daughter took it off carefully—her wrists had sleek slim spikes, a urchin come to land—and made it a gift, and they began discussing earrings, cheerfully.

A proper thunderclap shook the skies; everyone jumped and then laughed, and Gwen’s voice swept them all up, ushering them back to The Bell for tea and a fire and stories to be told. “And don’t think you’re getting out of this one, Jer, you’re telling us _everything_ , how did we not _know?_ ”

Jeremiah, walking next to his father, shouted back across bodies, “Because I’m not good at telling stories, make Cade do it!”

Gwen waved an admonishing finger at him, announced, “We’re hearing from the both of you!” and put a hand on her husband’s arm to help him over slippery stones.

Cadence, on Jeremiah’s other side, stayed quiet. He knew he could perform; he knew he would. They had a month to plan, a world to shape, to build, to prepare for; he had letters to write, an audience to arrange with the Queen, promises to make…

He was thinking of all those things, vaguely, but for the most part he was watching Jeremiah in the rain. Stories, and heroes; that shy sweet smile and the happy ending it deserved, every drop of happiness, everything, forever. He knew Nerein was talking animatedly to one of the fishermen, beside him; an attractive one, golden hair and freckles that cavorted even through the damp. Jeremiah still had on the Sea King’s royal favor, though most of the pearls had been shaken out of his hair.

Cade’s borrowed sea-chest robe was too large and scratchy with salt and embroidery. His feet were cold on rain-slick rocks and dirt. The rocks hurt: not his feet but his chest, his stomach, somewhere inside and invisible and heavy. Tantalizing visions of arriving horizons unfolded themselves, and he felt that, he did feel it, he knew he did.

But he kept glancing at Jeremiah’s profile, and he could not figure out whether he wanted to smile or to cry, and he knew the sensation of Jeremiah letting go of his hand.

He looked up at the painted wooden sign for The Bell. He looked at the door as they spilled into the main room: sea-creatures and land-creatures, loud and clamorous and flooding over with discoveries, filling up space, perching on chairs and tables and the floor by the hearth.

Warmth brushed up against him, disturbing unformed emotions; he found himself at the back of the crowd, by the staircase, and not alone. Jeremiah touched his hair, smiled. “You’re dripping.”

“Rain. The ocean. You were there, remember.”

“You look younger.”

“Not what I need to hear before I have to persuade the Queen and the Council to talk to mermaids. In a month’s time.”

“They’ll listen to you. I didn’t mean younger exactly. Just…different. Not in Court fashions and silk shirts. Not that I don’t like that too. I do. I don’t know. Sorry.”

“Speaking of different,” Cade said pointedly, and looked him up and down. The sarcasm rang badly; he couldn’t talk well with stones piled up in his chest.

“Yes. Well.” Jeremiah did a small eyebrow-shrug at him: adorable, earnest, self-mocking. “I’d change, but my clothes are in your room.”

“We _are_ a flight of stairs away from my room.” Our room. If you wanted, if I thought you wanted, if I deserved you. If.

“True.” Gwen and Rhys had gotten out tea; any minute someone’d start requesting explanations and narratives, though not yet. Jeremiah’s fingers slid into his; broad shoulders leaned in. “Did you try to throw a merman at me? During your impressive speech?”

“You said you loved him.” But his hand felt less lonely; it had that big kind one in it. He wished, oh he wished, and he did not know how to speak.

“I said in a way.” Jeremiah squeezed his hand; the crowd was getting along in a swirl of fresh-baked bread and chowder and tea and sugar, Old Joe showing a pretty merman the chessboard and promptly pulling out a chair in invitation when the man knew the game. “I followed _you_.”

“Why,” Cade said, half-angrily, more despairingly. He clung to that grip.

“You don’t know?” Jeremiah ran a thumb over the back of Cade’s hand, skin against skin. Another of the Sea King’s sons was talking to Rhys about herring-nets; the slim urchin-spine sea-fairy was gravely listening to Lilah and Catie’s daughter Clara tell tales of her favorite doll’s latest imaginary expedition. Bread and honey had appeared, fresh-baked and broken open and lavishly spread with butter; Gwen was glancing around for them, but when she saw Jeremiah’s expression she only waved and began offering rounds of The Bell’s best ale. Richard Carver glanced at them too, and with a surprising amount of tact for someone who'd spent decades avoiding other humans, went over and bashfully offered to help Gwen pour. “I thought you would’ve guessed. How stories end.”

“Not all stories.”

“The happy ones. Unless…” Jeremiah hesitated. “If you don’t—if you were trying not to—you don’t owe me anything, you don’t have to—I’ll walk away if you want. I promise I will.”

“You—what?”

“I can’t not ask,” Jeremiah went on. “I told you you make me want things. I’ve been—I’ve always been good at not asking for anything. Not talking about important pieces. Like underwater palaces. Or telling people that I lo—how I feel. I tend to just. Well. Not say anything. But I have to. I don’t want a merman I spent one night with years ago. I want this. I want you. I’ll try to learn how to be a hero for you. If you could want that.”

“You said you want _me_ ,” Cade said. “You do. You—you said it.”

“I do,” Jeremiah said, “I want you,” and then flinched, bit his lip, looked away. “I know you don’t—you said once it wasn’t about that, you and me—and I said I don’t expect anything, and I don’t—”

“Jeremiah Carver,” Cade said, barefoot in the corner of his parents’ inn, ancient robe falling off one shoulder, seawater and salt and rain drying in his hair; and then laughed, put a hand up just to feel the happiness, and laughed again. “You—only you could, after everything, after everything I’ve done to you—and you show up and save me, you save me time after time, every time I need you there you are—”

“I do try.” Jeremiah’s expression was a spell, an enchantment, a bit of escaping magic arrested in place: hope over doubt and the dwindling specter of unnecessary resignation. “Is that—are you saying—”

“I’m saying yes,” Cade said. “I want you.”

“You don’t have to just because I—”

“And you’re not listening. I need you. I _want_ you. I have since—I don’t know. The whole time, I think. I didn’t know.” He swallowed. Jeremiah hadn’t said the other word; he did not know whether he should, whether it might be welcome. He thought: I love you. I know I do. But if you don’t—if this is all I can have of you—it’s more than I deserve. I know. “I’m not a hero. I’m not like you. I’m—I think I’m not the sort of person you should want.”

“I think,” Jeremiah said, softly, thumb still running over his skin, caressing him and his heart, “I get to decide that. What I want. I told you that once, too.”

“But,” Cade said, and then saw the secret in that expression: teasing, coruscating, wanting, for him alone. He protested more, but feebly, “I like fine clothes. I like sleeping late.” He waited a beat, kept holding those velvet-loam eyes, let them hold him. “I like to feel important. I like being famous.”

Jeremiah’s mouth found that quiet amused line again: grave and tender joy hovered around lips, eyes, even shoulders. “I like taking care of people. I can be stubborn about that.”

“I know,” Cade agreed, with feeling. His hero was holding his hand, both of them finding anew each sensation. “I’ve noticed.”

“I like bacon.”

“I can learn to cook bacon.” He considered this. “Probably. I’ve never tried.”

“Gwen can teach us. Or you don’t have to learn to cook. I don’t need you to learn how to cook.”

“I need,” Cade began, and fumbled over sincerity, stunned wordless by the gift of Jeremiah’s smile, which he might someday deserve, “I need you. _I_ need you.”

“You have me.” Jeremiah drew him in, folded arms around him; they did not feel like a cage, but like a home. “You can have all of me.”

“Please,” Cade said, and the honesty spun like a weathervane: ragged emotion sparking electric suddenly, a craving, a plea. He wasn’t sure what he was asking for, but he was asking, dizzy with it. Jeremiah’s hand slid into his hair, and Cade tipped his head up.

They kissed to the sounds of cheering, of whistles and a rousing chorus of “The Sailor’s Cabin Boy” from the inn’s crowd, both human and, impressively, a few of the sea-folk. Cade flushed, laughed, hid his face in Jeremiah’s chest for a moment because he could; Jeremiah announced to the throng, “We’ll be back!” and grabbed his hand and tugged him up the stairs. More whistles followed, good-natured and full of delight. Old Joe nodded in their direction. Cadence, recalling earlier warnings, hoped this meant approval.

His room lay poised the way he’d left it: scattered clothing on the floor and on the chair, hills and valleys of pale sheets across the bed, gaping suitcases, open notebooks, pens and ink and unsent letters. Rain cheered at them in a patter of drops on windowpane glass, curtains parted in welcome; new envelopes had arrived on the desk. The topmost one bore Felix’s flamboyant composer’s scribble; the royal seal made itself visible on the corner of the slim note under that, which in turn rested atop a packet bearing his Londre solicitor’s address. Jeremiah unfastened a waterfall of shimmering scales and shells and magic, glanced around, draped it gingerly over the back of the chair. Magic met one of Cade’s shirts and a rose-gold-and-diamond pile of earrings; they got along there, not at all displeased to share space on furniture.

“The Queen,” said Jeremiah, who’d evidently followed his gaze to the stack of mail. Gwen must’ve brought it up, ordinary routine not yet become extraordinary; only a day away, Cade remembered, and couldn’t help laughing. One day. So much. Too much, a whole new life, and his heart felt new too, fragile and fractured and repaired and reborn.

He shrugged out of the too-big embroidery-weighted robe, let it puddle on the rug, let himself be naked. “The Queen, yes. Who doesn’t know about any of this. Mermen and Sea Kings and adventures.”

“You’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”

“We.” Cade poked him in the bicep, turned the gesture into a caress without really meaning to: his hand lingering over muscle. “Don’t think you’re getting out of it.”

“Everything’s going to change.” Jeremiah put a hand over his, taking it, claiming it. “ _You_ changed everything. With a story.”

“I keep saying we.” He folded fingers into big gentle ones, laced them together, pressed a thumb over Jeremiah’s wrist and felt the thump of pulse beating there. It matched his own. “Not everything’ll change. Only…well, most things. The North. The islands. Politics and fishing-rights. All our fairy-stories.”

“So. Everything.”

“No,” Cade said. “Or yes. You and me. But not like—you came upstairs. With me.” His heart flung itself at his breastbone, trembling. “We’re doing this together.” Aren’t we, was the question; but he couldn’t ask it.

“You’ve just managed,” Jeremiah observed, “to give us responsibility for orchestrating the first-ever diplomatic overtures between the land and the sea. I hope you know how to talk to turtles.”

“I’m terrified. But I’ve got a very patient schoolteacher to help. Why turtles?”

“That’s what I thought of first. I’ve never met the Queen.” When Cade walked exploring hands over oceanic armor—mysterious, sea-woven, clinging—Jeremiah lifted arms obligingly, let him tug at fasteners and ties. “This schoolteacher of yours…”

“He’s the best person I know,” Cade said, hands at Jeremiah’s hips, busy between tanned skin and the artifacts of enchantment. “He always has been. Anyway he’s met a King. And saved a selkie. And me.”

“And he likes asking if you feel warm enough, or if you want tea, or if you feel like walking to a bookshop.” Jeremiah’s clinging leggings joined the shirt on the floor; Cade discovered a lack of any underthings beneath, and caught breath all over again: that newfound breakable sensation again, as if this were the very first time.

Both of them naked, he leaned into Jeremiah’s height and heat for a moment, for a kiss; though their bodies, hips, arousal pressed together, he did not want to move yet, only to feel those lips under his, to taste salt and kindness and the tiny moan of want when he pressed closer. He rested his head on the nearest shoulder, needing an anchor; he ran a hand through Jeremiah’s hair and encountered pearls braided there.

Satiny and cream-swirled as moonbeams, the largest one came loose and fell into his palm: a symbol, a relic, a reminder of magic. And it was only that: it did not sing to him, did not promise him freedom and splendid isolation and a world free from care.

He did care. He wanted to build the future. He wanted to spin that story into existence and write the greatest play of his life on the greatest stage of his life. He thought of schools and new plays and artworks and a royal-charter scientific society of natural philosophers, of students at the water’s edge and of the mingling taking place downstairs at that instant, over Gwen’s bread and honey and ale.

He thought about his schoolteacher at his side. In every imagining of the future, the future he wanted, he wanted that.

He turned, set the large luminous jewel on his desk, let it glow faintly over half-sketched disguised-princess plots. He would, he decided, have to start the operetta anew.

His schoolteacher watched him, started to speak, paused. Cade raised an eyebrow, inquiring.

“Your parents—” Jeremiah cut himself off, waved a hand: “Never mind.”

“My parents,” Cade echoed, wondering when he’d missed context. He flicked a strand of auburn out of his eyes: getting too long, and too messy now, a tangle of everything they’d been through. He’d need to wash it properly, and it’d curl when drying. It wanted Jeremiah’s fingers in it, to leave it messy all over again.

“They’d be proud of you, I was going to say. But they always were.” Jeremiah shifted weight, moved a foot: incongruously apologetic and naked, sea-grass armor on the floor and one pearl remaining visible over his left ear. “The way they talked about you, when I’d come over to help out—but I don’t know if you want to hear that. Sorry. I know it’s hard.”

It was hard; it hurt, and he thought it forever would: a hole, a gap, two presences missing. He wished he’d come home; he wished he’d spoken to them. He’d forever wish that, as well.

But he’d been discovering that he could live with hurt, lately; he was here and alive, and he was not here alone.

He said, “I’m not going to sell the inn, you know.”

Jeremiah sat down on the bed.

Cade came over, put a hand on his chest, pushed him flat without any force. Jeremiah landed readily on his back, and lay there grinning, eyes all lit up and pleased.

Cade swung a leg over him, settled down on top, felt their bodies rub and press together, hot and hard and ready and wonderful. Nose to nose, he explained, “I’m going to keep it. This place. Turn it into, um, a diplomatic meeting venue, an embassy, a reception hall. Since we’re making this the center of the North. Maybe we can build a decent theater, if you know anyone with a hotel or enormous house I could buy, I’ve kind of got a lot of money. Also we’ll need room for a branch of the University up here, once you properly found that new division of oceanic folklore studies—what?”

“You.” Jeremiah stayed put and radiated pure pleasure at him. “This. I could listen to you forever. Right here.”

Cade raised eyebrows. “That’s all you want? Not me moving, or doing this, or _this_ …”

“Um,” Jeremiah said. “Yes, please. Please do that. Cadence?”

Cade kept playing with that nipple, pinching and tugging and twisting, enough to start that slow shuddering fall into surrender; Jeremiah whimpered a little and squirmed under him and made very lovely sounds; Cade gave him a second to recover. “What were you asking?”

“Was I? Oh…um, us. About—about us. If you’re—oh _yes_ please do that again—”

“That? You do like that, don’t you…”

“Yes.” Jeremiah was panting, quivering under him, nipple reddened and pebble-hard under these ministrations. “If you’re staying—you _are_ staying—”

“Not going anywhere.” He slid down a bit, kissed abused flesh, lapped at sensitive spots with his tongue. He was feeling an odd mix of newfound guilt and absolute desire and strange yearning to protect; he wanted Jeremiah to feel purely good, to be cared for, to feel adored and cherished in every way Cade had failed him before. He left kisses over that chest, pledged to the taut muscle of Jeremiah’s stomach, “I’m here.”

“You are.” Peeking at him, head craned to watch each motion. “I wondered—if you might—I mean, half my stuff’s made it over here anyway, and I’m only renting that guest house at the Parrs’, and I know Da wants to see me, us, you’re invited, more, I think he’s trying to make up for—but he’s not used to people much and I’d rather not push and I would rather, with you—if you—if you wanted we could, I could—”

“Stay,” Cade said, and only realized this sounded like an order when Jeremiah visibly tried to hold still. “No. Yes. I mean, if you want. But I mean yes to you. Stay with me. Move _all_ your books over here. Please. Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Oh fuck yes. I want you here.” Always, always. Don’t leave me. I need you. I love you. My hero. Possibilities, futures, hope: they trembled in his hands, moving over Jeremiah’s body. “I want you here with me. Does this—do you like this? When I…” He had a hand around that gorgeous thick cock, stroking slowly; he tried to make that good too, every way he knew that would bring nothing but pleasure.

“Yes,” Jeremiah said again. “Cade…”

“Are you sure? Tell me if I do anything you don’t like. If I hurt you. If I ever have. If I’m not doing something you want. I want you to tell me. Please.”

“Cadence?”

Cade froze, fingers encircling Jeremiah’s shaft, afraid to move.

“Um.” Jeremiah was blushing: pink across broad chest and bare skin. “Can you—are you trying to be nice to me? I like it, but—”

“But?” He managed to talk because he had to. He’d gone numb with horror. But he had to make this right. “What did I—”

“No, no, sorry, I didn’t mean that!” Jeremiah sat up, hand landing on his. “No, it’s just—the things we, um, we’ve been doing—when you make it hurt a bit, or when you tell me what to do, or that I can’t, ah, finish unless you let me and I earn it, or—”

“Have you _not liked that_ —”

“I do!” Blushing everyplace now, but rather frantically sincere; Jeremiah released Cade’s wrist to scuff hands through his hair, leaving it extra-fluffy, and muttered, “I really do. I never knew I—I was going to ask you. If you would. At least talk to me—the things you say when—I feel good when you say that. When you call me. Um. You know. Your—your good boy. Those things.”

Cade sat very very motionless and stared at him. Their legs had gotten tangled up; the rain had snuck away into the diminishing afternoon in order to leave them some privacy. The bed made itself somehow even more plush and bouncy with excitement.

“Oh fuck me,” Jeremiah said, and hid his face behind both hands. “I’m so sorry. You were trying to be nice and I—never mind, don’t listen to me, don’t do anything you don’t feel like—”

Cadence, having had a minute to process and recover and shiver inside with anticipation, said, “Look at me.”

An order. A command: it hung in the air and drew weight to itself. Important. Full of expectance.

Jeremiah dropped the hands and blinked at him, sitting in place. His cock twitched.

“Good,” Cade told him. “So obedient. Such a good boy.”

“Oh,” Jeremiah said.

“I told you to tell me what you want. You did.” He flipped through possible next words, decided on, “So good at listening to me. When I give you orders.”

Jeremiah at this point seemed speechless. His lips had parted, and remained that way; he actually shivered, watching Cade’s mouth, drinking in syllables.

“Lie back down,” Cade said. “Hands on the headboard. Don’t move.”

This time he got a wonderfully amenable tiny gasp, and Jeremiah nodded and got into position as instructed, eyes huge and dark and dreamy in acquiescence; body starting to grow dreamy too, big and soft and compliant.

Cade settled in next to him, trailed a hand over him: shoulder, chest, hip, thigh. “You look so good like this. All mine, doing what I tell you, just for me. Because you want to, don’t you? So sweet. My sweet boy.”

Jeremiah shivered, shut both eyes, clearly wanted to lean into the caress and also to not move, as commanded. His cock stood up, hot and rigid; he was already dripping with want. Cade skimmed a finger along that length, up and down the shaft, down to tight-drawn balls, back to the tip, where he played with dribbles of desire and that delicious slit. Jeremiah moaned, low and wordless; when Cade checked his eyes had gone distant, euphoric, lost to rainbows.

He closed his hand around the shaft, tugged, stroked, toyed with that ready and vulnerable flesh: a hint of fingernails, a tease of feather-light pain, other hand petting a hip for soothing. Jeremiah started crying at that: not badly, merely uncontained unabashed small sobs in the bewildering onslaught of sensation. His hips jerked upward, pleading for more.

“So good,” Cade praised him softly, fondling him, holding him down. “So wonderful. Incredible. You saved me. You save people. You try to do the right thing, I know you do, and you’re so good, and so brave, and you did so well, and I’m going to make you feel good, understand? Because you deserve that. You’re my good boy and I want you to feel good.”

Jeremiah made a different sound: half mortified, half suffused by pleasure, unused to praise and falling apart under it. His hands hadn’t stirred, splayed against dark wood. Cade bent over him and kissed him, murmured, “If you need to stop please tell me, just move a hand or something, or say stop and I will, I promise you I will, so please, if you need to.”

“I—” Jeremiah opened eyes with what looked like herculean effort: yielded and transcendent, that open honest gaze scooped Cade’s heart into its orbit for all time, though it had before already. “Why would I want—”

“You might. If it’s too much.” He nibbled another kiss at the corner of Jeremiah’s mouth, down to the spot under his jawline, to his throat. “An order. A rule. I want you to tell me if you ever stop feeling good.”

“Yes,” Jeremiah breathed promptly. “I will. But, Cade—right now—”

“Yes, sweet boy?” Fingers tracing those lips, that mouth; Jeremiah kissed them, let Cade slip them into his mouth, suckled at them.

Cade took them away momentarily. “You were saying?”

“Right now I feel wonderful,” Jeremiah whispered. “You said I—you said I was, and I feel—it’s so bright and light and warm, like floating—please don’t stop.”

Cade laughed, promised, “Never, unless you ask,” and kissed him again, fiercer and sharper and harder, desire glinting like flame along the surface; he found oil, moved fingers, watched those long legs spread unconsciously further apart at his touch. He made it slow, but thorough: fingers entering, plunging, thrusting in and out, adding more.

Jeremiah moaned and squirmed and tried to pull him deeper, tried to open up wider, whimpering and saying his name and giving way, growing loose and slick and shining with oil. Cade fucked him with fingers, with a hand, pushing inexorably into him, and told him not to come, to be good, and Jeremiah collapsed into profound submissive compliance under the weight of words and of sensation. Cade petted him more and told him how good he was; Jeremiah, drowsy and radiant, shuddered with ecstasy.

When Cade moved atop him, cock pushing at his entrance, sliding into him, they both gasped. Outside the rain sang, spilling silver on aged glass.

Cade thrust into him hard, wanting him to feel it, all the way inside in one motion; Jeremiah let out a tiny cry of shock or surprise. “Oh—”

“Oh no,” Cade got out, petrified, “did I—are you—”

“No—just—so deep, I can feel—”

“I’m so sorry,” Cade mourned, balanced over him, gazing down at him, “I’ve been horrible to you, I’ve—I’ve hurt you, I know I have, I’m awful and selfish and—but I swear, I swear, I’m going to make it up to you, anything you want, everything I can do, I’ll be better for you, just tell me—”

“Cadence Bell,” Jeremiah interrupted, languorous haze sharpening to abrupt impatient need, “I swear by every damn single fish in that damn ocean, if you don’t stop apologizing and get back to fucking me—”

“Sorry!”

Jeremiah said, _“Seriously?”_ But they had both dissolved into laughter, amazed and absurd; Cade dropped his head to rest on one of those shoulders, shaking with love and gratitude and desperate joy. Jeremiah put both arms around him, and kissed his ear.

Cade said into his shoulder, “I’ve never heard you swear before.”

“Yes. Well. I’ve never had anyone make me feel like that and then stop to fuss over me before. I honestly don’t know whether I want to try to kick you or beg you to let me feel that again. Because, um, fuck.”

Cade started laughing again.

“I know the _word_.”

“Obviously you do. My sweet boy, with a filthy mouth…”

“Hmm,” Jeremiah suggested. “You could spank me.”

“Oh, could I. Maybe later.” He had not ever quite seen this side of those sparkling eyes, mischievous and making propositions and thoroughly delighted. He liked it. He loved it: he wanted to say so, words aching at the tip of his tongue.

He kept them there. Earlier Jeremiah had said _want, need, choices_. Not love.

He shifted weight, rocked their bodies against each other. Still hard, both of them; himself still buried deep within.

“Mmm,” Jeremiah agreed. “Yes, please.”

“And still so polite. Even with that mouth.” He tapped an index finger over the mouth in question, got a kiss. “I just…”

“You don’t want to hurt me.” Jeremiah stretched hands back up over his head, put them deliberately back in place: on the headboard. “I know. So you won’t.”

This time Cadence said, “Oh,” and then, “You believe that?”

“Of course I do.”

“Oh,” Cade breathed out again, a wondering thankful honored exhale of sound, and stroked a hand along Jeremiah’s arm, wrist to shoulder, feeling it quiver in place.

He moved more carefully, then; but he did move, and he watched every expression, every gasp and lip-bite and squirm and moan; he memorized every detail, every motion and sensation that led to those delicious sounds and wriggles, and every moment of bliss in those enormous eyes. He needed to see it all. To see Jeremiah coming apart in endless pleasure, cherished and praised and taken into soaring flight.

He whispered, “So good, so amazing, you always are—you rescue me all the time, you take care of me, let me take care of you, my sweet boy,” and felt the response, the instinctive clenching around him, the ripples of need; Jeremiah blinked up at him, hazy and trusting and almost innocent, but that was a smile unfurling like a sail as their eyes met: it ran through Cade’s body like molten gold.

He demanded, barely audible amid awe, “I want to see you come like this, come for me while I’m _fucking_ you,” and suited action to words, even harder and pounding; Jeremiah’s body took it, took him, slick and open and surrendered to each thrust, each impact into that firework spot over and over. Jeremiah sobbed his name, shaking and tensing and all at once shuddering with release, cock spurting long hot waves between their bodies, hips twitching helplessly, involuntarily, given over to command and capitulation and care, the care Cadence could give him, the adoration and submission and acceptance and praise.

Cadence, thrusting into him, seeing him at that instant, came undone as well; the peak flared instant and unstoppable, a rising swell of love and want like sunlight building and redoubling and spilling from his bones, from his heart, from everyplace inside.

They lay together in bed, sticky and sated, after.

Eventually, once Cade could think, he propped himself up on one arm, touched Jeremiah’s cheek, traced salt and dampness. He gathered tears on a fingertip, eased them away.

“Cade,” Jeremiah said, voice tiny, and reached fumblingly for him; Cade said, “I’m here, I’ve got you, shh, just let me take care of you, you were so good, so perfect, just let me—” and tenderly cleaned them both up, gentle as he knew how to be, while his heart splintered apart around the spear of clear crystalline love.

Perfection, he thought. Yes. Yes, this, please just let me—

He held Jeremiah for a while. The aftermath lingered, faded, transmuted into worn-out glory and exalted tired bodies. He thought that they should probably go downstairs, soon or sometime; they’d be missed, and they were after all the central story, or his quiet clinging schoolteacher with lips currently aimlessly nuzzling his collarbone was, at least. They’d have work to do. Obligations. Challenges. Creation. He left a kiss on the top of Jeremiah’s head.

Jeremiah yawned, tried to become both smaller and closer to him, and settled back down. Cade asked, because he had to, he needed to hear it, “Good? For you.”

“Yes.” Sleepy, certain, fulfilled: the answer made the bedroom weightless, hanging halos around plain furniture and magical pearls. “Everything feels good, Cade.”

“Good.” He rubbed that broad back. “That’s good.”

“…you? Good.”

“Yes.” He put his cheek in dark hair, closed his eyes. “Yes.”

“Good,” Jeremiah said again, with drowsy firmness, and stuck a leg between Cade’s, and became tranquil and contented, breathing slow and regular and if not asleep then close to it.

They stayed in bed. They shifted positions after a few moments, because the bed wasn’t made for two grown men when one of them had extravagant shoulders. Jeremiah ended up mostly on his back, Cadence nestled at his side and partly atop him, both their arms around each other. Cade kissed him and told him to go back to sleep, they’d worry about everything else when he woke up. Jeremiah might’ve protested but didn’t. The window, curtains unclosed, revealed shimmering tapestried light: clouds wandering off with the wind, sun sinking to the beckoning of the sea, waves bursting themselves in passion on familiar grey stones. Their new pearl, the one fallen from hair-braids, winked at them from the desk.

Cadence, half-awake, dreamed of operas and heroes. Of cloaks and disguises and magic spells that could be broken by a kiss, a recognition, true love. A song about love and the way it felt like sorcery, bewitchment, the beautiful kind. Changing a person, changing the future, with its presence.

He let his head rest on that sturdy shoulder; he listened to that steady heartbeat, true as waves. He whispered, “I’m in love with you, you know. I love you,” and he felt his heart open up and bloom as he said it: gold and roses and the way Jeremiah’s smile started in dancing earth-brown eyes and warmed the whole world.

Jeremiah, who had after all not been asleep, said, “You what?”

Cade, ruffled and indignant, started to sit up and glare; Jeremiah’s arms anchored him in place. He muttered, “Nothing.”

“I love you,” Jeremiah said, and Cadence Bell stared at him amid sundown clouds, streaks of fading indigo rain over distant waves and the tang of salt, himself and all of them equally speechless with hope and disbelief.

“I love you,” Jeremiah said again, and laughed aloud: astonished by revelation. “I always have. Since we were boys. I used to imagine I could be the hero in one of your stories. So you’d notice me. Only daydreams, of course. Then.”

“I should’ve—”

“And then you went away,” Jeremiah went on, and Cade got quiet and listened, because this was important, this was his heart and their hearts and everything, “and I was happy for you, and then you came back. And you were still brighter than anyone else somehow. All brilliant and clever and shining. And you needed someone. You needed me.”

“I _do_ need you.”

“I like it when you kiss me. I like you. I always loved you, but I realized I liked you, after you came back. After we started—um, us. You weren’t a magician or a god or a flawless perfect genius. Which you are. A genius. But. You were doing your best, and you were hurting, and you were real, and brave, and I kept wanting to make you smile.”

Cade kissed him again; kissed him until they ended up panting and brimming over with desire, thrumming like the tide. “You do. You always do. You know what to say. When I don’t. You know _me_.”

“If you’ll let me,” Jeremiah said, lying happily beneath him, wrists willingly pinned under Cade’s hands. “I want to.”

“I love you,” Cade told him, promised him, vowed into the next kiss: a fealty of lips. “I want everything with you. Everything we’ve just done. Everything we’re going to do in, oh hell, a month from now. The world. Any world. Underwater, on land, wherever we end up next. This bed. All of it. With you.”

“I love you,” Jeremiah said, “Cadence Bell.”

“I love you,” Cade said, “Jeremiah Carver—when I said everything I meant it. Um. I’m supposed to be good with words. But I’m not, I’m—I meant to ask you a question. Just now. If you would, if you ever would—if we’re doing this together and—and I don’t want to lose you, I don’t want to—I want to stay with you. If you want me. I said everything. And maybe—not yet, I know, I know you wouldn’t, why would you say yes, it’s too soon and I owe you, I don’t know, a lifetime of apologies and amazing sex, but I think I do mean a lifetime, and—”

Jeremiah’s mouth, despite the lying-prone position on their bed, fell open.

“You'd think,” Cade said, getting lost in nerves and despair, “you’d think I’d be better at this—I’ve written literally _hundreds_ of drafts of proposals for the stage but I—oh, fuck. It _matters_ this time. It’s _you_.”

“Cade,” Jeremiah said, eyes enormous, tone very much that of a person granted one wish and trying to believe it, “did you just—are you asking me to—marry you?”

“I think…yes? Or if not now, not yet, if you would, um, maybe someday, if you’d even think about—”

“Yes!” Jeremiah flung arms around him, making the bed creak with joyfulness. “Yes, of course yes—I said yes to you already, I almost said it earlier, downstairs—I love you, I was thinking, I love you, I only didn’t know if you—oh, fuck, Cade, yes. I’m yours. Completely yes.”

“You said _yes_.”

“Everything,” Jeremiah said. “Yes to everything. It’ll be complicated and I don’t know what I’m doing and we have four weeks to do it, you made me a professor—I’m not giving up my school, my kids, we’ll figure that out, I can do both—and you turned us into ambassadors of culture or something—”

“Oh, I like that, we should think about titles—you said you were mine, and yes—”

“—and I want to _do_ everything. With you. When we decide we’re ready. I’ll have to stop paying rent and move in with you. My ex is a merman and he’s downstairs and I don’t want to think about how to explain _that_ part of the story to Queen Lyssa. And I want to get married, I want to marry you, I love big weddings, I always have. I love being yours. In bed and out of it. And I love you. Did that make any sense? I’m not making sense.”

“You’re my hero,” Cade said, hands in Jeremiah’s hair, lying atop him, grinning at this overflow of afterglow and emotions and sheer enthusiasm, feeling the answer in his own acrobatically-inclined heart, swinging on trapezes. “And we did just have that. You being mine. The amazing sex. So you don’t have to make sense yet. But yes, I’ve got it, I think. You love weddings. So do I. Getting dressed up, throwing the party, dancing with you. I’ll get Felix to write us a wedding-song, he’ll adore that, he’ll show off.” Of course he’d write one himself; he already halfway was, in his head. But that’d be private, personal, the two of them and his lute or guitar.

“I like chocolate,” Jeremiah said hopefully.

“Chocolate wedding-cake, then. Making promises to you. _With_ you. In front of everyone. Your father. Your ridiculous royal merman, who I think was flirting with your first kiss, downstairs. Gwen and Rhys. Any Kings and Queens who want to show up. Maybe with pearls in your hair. And we have absolutely too much to do, and we don’t have to do it all right away…”

“But we can make plans.”

“Yes,” Cade said, “so many plans, especially the wedding plans, so we should get started, and of course they’re waiting for us downstairs, any minute now someone’s going to start knocking on the door,” and went back to kissing Jeremiah, letting the world tumble toward the future while waves boomed on island shores and a sea-pearl bathed the room in iridescent milky light.

**Author's Note:**

> Not that I'm necessarily planning to write it, but the short sequel/spin-off is obviously Jeremiah's exes, merman and human, getting together, as per the implication at the end! :-p Jeremiah is totally purely one hundred percent happy for them. Cade is too, although he's also just a tiny bit selfishly relieved, because a small part of him has discovered heretofore unknown insecurities about not being good enough to deserve Jeremiah alongside a young and gorgeous magical merman ex with an attractively bratty mouth. He's very, very happy to encourage Peter's attempts to woo.
> 
> Also, my playlist for this one:
> 
> Eve 6, “Rescue”  
> “Fiddler’s Green,” either the Exmouth Shanty Men version or the version by The Dubliners  
> Reginald De Koven and Clement Scott, _Robin Hood_ (the 1890 opera)  
>  Gilbert and Sullivan, _H.M.S. Pinafore_  
>  Fall Out Boy, “Of All The Gin Joints”  
> Tacocat, “Talk”  
> Green Day, “Still Breathing”  
> Carl Carlton, “Everlasting Love”  
> Smashing Pumpkins, "Luna"


End file.
